I’ll trade you a Foucault for two Erving Goffmans
The pop culturization of the international egghead class has begun. So begins an article in my local paper about (according to the site) free downloadable trading cards depicting theorists and concepts close to the hearts of people interested in social and cultural theory, gender and identity, and media studies.

Of course, I immediately thought of AKMA, Steve Himmer, and Mike Sanders, especially since Card # 5 is the “Postmodernity Card.” And, of course, there’s always Card #3, the “Michael Foucault” card. My favorites, of course, are # 11, the "bell hooks” card, and #22, the "plastic.com" card, which includes – RageBoy take note – the word “fucknozzels!”

They’re looking for more cards, which you can design and send to them, using a format described on the site. Do you hear that, Gary Turner, creator of "blogstickers?" Oh, and “cards about people who are not old white men are encouraged!”

Oh Yeah!
I love this quote, lifted from the site of the Heartless Bitches:

Here's the thing: If you ever get me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do with me." -- Maxine (in "Being John Malkovich")

Depth Charges
On Blogsisters, Jeneane Sessum posts about Helene Cixous, whose urgings and urges find their visceral marks in the writings of such as Chris Locke, Mike Golby, and Jeneane herself -- bloggers who careen headlong down those brambled, precipice-riddled paths of memory and desire, prodding our pulses with their raw prose and challenging our own emotional inhibitions with their soul-full honesty. What they mean is what they say. Unlike my word trips that have always tended to slide along within the protective cover of metaphor.

Take Spring, which always seems to put me in a funk; it always overwhelms me with its sweetness, its promise, its newness, its hope. Yet, despite the prolific stirrings of nature, I have never felt any kind of passion generated by that season. It offers me heavy pregnancy but not heady passion.

Waiting for the Fall
I was never one to yearn for spring,
the sky too full of eager wings,
the air a burden of song.
Even the ground swells, straining
under a yoke of seeds.

I wake with the winds of autumn,
when a cold sun
fades the trees to clarity,
when the line of the sky
cuts clean and sharp
above the leveled land,
when the earth is a slate
set for the poet’s chalk.

Leave me in spring
to wait for the season’s passing,
and look for me then,
when I turn with the leaves
and hold my mouth
to a hungry sky.

Maybe it’s that Spring is mating season, and, not having a mate at the moment, I’m out of synch with the season. Rather than feel fertile and rooted, I feel separate, untethered. There’s something major missing, something just beyond my grasp, something unspoken, some fundamental secret just beyond my ken.

The Hunter
On the rise beyond the stream
on Trout Mountain,
they say, he shot himself—
a still-young man
despaired of a world
too full of fear.

On the west wall of his cabin,
hang the antlers he tore
from some stalked fair game,
banging the nails bent
through thick bone,
clumsily shattered skull.

In the shifting summer light,
their shadows writhe
in fearsome memory.

(They say he loved the land,
the hunt, the kill.)

Some think the land is haunted, now.
They say they can feel the fear
in the heavy mountain mist,
hear it in the hollow scrape
of bone on stone.

(They say what he feared
he loved too much.)

When land was finally sold
(to someone starkly purged
of love and fear)
the new owner found a photo
face-down on a dusty shelf –
a stiff-faced young man
in an unforgiving setting,
sternly victorious over
his finally fearless prey.

And so I ask for the antlers,
chipped and weathered, now --
artifacts made unworthy
of either fear or love.

Is the answer hidden somewhere
in the pits of those old bones?
If I scrub them clean, soften the scars,
set them like icons on an altar
ringed with strings of stones,
will I dream one night
of some daring beast
who lifts me gently
on his gleaming horns
and tells me
the unspeakable secret?

Speaking of "Deep Throat"
According to the SF Gate,
John Dean, the White House counsel whose revelations about the Nixon presidency were the first flames in the volcano of Watergate scandal, is about to turn up the heat again by revealing the identity of Deep Throat. .....At an L.A. Times book festival discussion of "Abuse of Power, Then & Now" -- including panelists Oliver Stone and Arianna Huffington, moderated by Chronicle Columnist Bob Scheer -- Dean said "The Deep Throat Brief" will be published online by Salon.com on June 17

Nixon and Watergate: now there's a scenario that's really obscene.

Go Transgenics!
In the Dark Angel's season finale tonight, Joshua, the artist/transgenic who looks an awful lot like the "beast" in the old "Beauty and the Beast" TV series of several years ago, paints a red, white, and blue flag with a white dove that I wish would be published online as an image that could be copied. I'd love to have it in my site. They should promote it as a symbol around which all anti-violence "outsiders" could rally.

Hee Hee!
I just have to share this Comment that "Uncle Sam"left on my blog about Linda Lovelace's death .

You should be ashamed of yourself for likin pornography.
This is is the type of material that weaknes us so that the Muslims can take over.
-Uncle Sam

Now, what am I supposed to make of that? No email address; two misspellings in the two-line Comment; no "voice" and no Comment feature on his/her own site. I guess he/she is either (1) a terrorist posing as an American in order to undermine our democratic right to free speech, (2) a complete illiterate idiot and an embarrassment to the American educational system, or (3) someone trying, unsuccessfully, to demonstrate a sense of humor. No wonder he/she chooses to hide behind anonymity.

And just to make it perfectly clear, I never said that I liked pornography.

Even if it's not real, it's still true.
b!X emailed me the following, attributing it to Nazi monster Hermann Goering. I don't know if Goering ever really said it, but even if he didn't, he could have, and it's still true:

Why of course the people don't want war! Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

Almost Famous
Thanks to my blogfriend Anita Bora, who writes for rediff.com, Blog Sisters and Kalilily Time got some play in that online magazine this month. The article also links to Mike Golby, Gary Turner, Anita (of course), and b!X.

It always amazes and delights me how these loosely joined pieces keep constantly reconfiguring and reconnecting. The feature article, written by Nidhi Taparia Rathi, profiles the online experiences of three "older generation" netizens, including me. How cool is that!

Inside Out and Upside Down
While Blogsisters readies its first ever monthly Burning Issues soapbox (Turn Beauty Inside Out), b!X finally gets around to finding something he thinks is worth posting, and it’s a glimpse into an alternate universe, where the assumptions of the corporation's mission are inverted. His post explains that the manner in which we have structured the entities known as "corporations" is not some sort of inherent natural law, but one we have deliberately created. And it is one that is in no sense the only way in which a free market "corporation" can be constructed.

The “inverted” version, as he quotes from The Divine Right of Capital , certainly gives one pause.

Brave Hearts
Shelley Powers, Tom Shurgart, and stavrosthewonderchicken all have beat me to making this post acknowledging the uncanny talent that both RageBoy and Mike Golby have for peeling back their skin and letting you not only see, but feel what they're made of.

Chris Locke/RageBoy is a pioneer in publicly and purposefully dissolving the boundaries between his passions and the hearts of his readers:
For better or worse, I said, I am trying to live my life in public. Online. We've never had any channel for this. No models. And the models we need are not "model" lives but real ones. Uncertain and afraid, crippled, broken. Trying to make sense of our minds and our hearts and the world we encounter out here. Telling each other what it's like to be human. Making what we can with all we've got. Not shitting ourselves and each other with facile platitudes, easy formulas, empty slogans. A human life for all to see, for what it's worth. It may not be worth much, but that's what I'm doing here. Not a model life, but writing that shakes and shivers and burns and speaks for whatever life we have.

I have just finished reading both the Cluetrain Manifesto and Bombast Transcripts , which I promised Chris I would. Soon I will post my reactions to those texts, as I promised Chris I would.

Just Curious.
Who is Samuel Mcauley and why is he leaving very brief compliments in my Comments without indicating contact information?

I like tracking down people I don't know who leave comments because they usually have compelling blogs of their own. So, who are you and where are you hiding?

Lapham hits the mark, as usual
Jason of museunlimited pointed me to an article by Lewis Lapham in this month's Harper's which analyzes Ashcroft's and Bush's crusade mentality. There are two quotes from that article that particular grabbed me:

I happened to read "The Psychology of War," a study of the ways in which human beings adjust their interpretations of reality in order to recognize the mass murder of other human beings as glorious adventure and noble enterprise. First published in 1992 but fortunately brought back into print this year by the Helios Press, the book, written by Lawrence LeShan, draws a distinction between the sensory and the mythic perceptions of war. Let war become too much of a felt experience, as close at hand as the putrid smell of rotting flesh or the presence of a newly headless corpse seated in a nearby chair, and most people tend to forget to sing partiotic songs.

and

Because the civilian population finds itself drafted into service as the target of opportunity for terrorists armed with asymmetric waeapons, we're being asked to believe that we're opposed by Morgoth and the Corsairs of Umbar rather than by an incoherent diaspora of desperate human beings, most of them illiterate and many of them children, reduced to expressing their resentment in the impoverished vocabularies of violence. Best not to see our enemies as they are; better to go quietly into the caves of myth thoughtfully prepared by our news media and our schools, there to find, praise be to Allah, our comfort, our salvation, and our glory.

See also Jasons post on the Politics of Fear.

There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers....
from Outer Banks by Anne Rivers Siddons

There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers. In our eyes, the world is divided by it, made up of those who walk frail, careening rope bridges over the abysses and those who do not. We know each other. I do not think it is a concsious thing with us, this knowing, at least not most of the time, or we would flee from each other as from montsers. It is an animal thing. It is only on that wild old neck-prickling level that we meet. It is only in our eyes that we acknowledge that our twin exhalations have touched and mingled. Sometimes, though not often, one of the others, the non-abyss people, will know us too. You may even know the feeling yourself; you may have met someone about whom otherness clings like miasma; you can feel it on your skin though you can't name it. When that happens, you have me one of us. You may even be one of us, down deep and in secret. The other half of the world, the solid, golden half, the non-abyssers...they feel nothing under their feet but solidity. They inherit the earth. We inherit the wind.

Anne Siddons is someone I read during those lazy summer days when I don't want to think too hard; I just want to be entertained. But the above quote is something that must have caught in my thoughts one summer because I found it typed up and lost among my many drafts of many poems. I like the notion of "abyss-walkers." It kind of goes along with my view of myself as a "rim-walker" -- definitely NOT one of the "solid golden half."

A Sense of Scent
This afternoon, I walked over to check on my grave-sized garden. The parsley patch I planted last year was already up and dancing in the wind. In the corner, small green sprouts of new lavender peered through layers of winter-grayed spikes. I held one of the new lavender leaves up to my nose. I love the smell of lavender, only in part because one of the great romantic adventurers of my life loved it too. The scent lingering in my memory prompted me to unearth this poem I wrote in the early 90s.

The Sense of Scent

She thought she was done with him,
but one night the moon rose
clear and full-faced,
and an early autumn wind
swept the scent of lavender
through her open window.

Some times are harder than others
to sit silent,
hands clenched against
the lure of the pen,
mouth set against
the call of the phone,
thinking to oneself
that some things are better
left to silence,
to the slow decay of time,
the turning of moons
and lavender seasons.

But even in the darkest of corners
some things refuse to die –
some small husk still
riddled with seeds,
some insistent root
defying the dust,
some dormant dream
of a riotous clash of hearts,
curious clutch of minds,
a dance of hands that
hope and hold and, too soon,
let go.

She thought she was done with him,
except his voice
still pulls at her belly
like the insistent tides of the moon.
So when he calls
from places lush
with a thousand thriving things,
she sends him dewy lavender
wrapped in familiar black lace,
because, they say,
the sense of smell
is the most visceral,
holding even the darkening
memory of the dying.

Sigh. Spring.

What is happening to our children?
We give them birth, and most of us look forward to all that comes after. We do our best to teach their minds, touch their hearts, heal their bodies, guide their souls, keep their eyes clear and their butts clean. We frustrate them, we limit them, sometimes we embarrass them, but we always love them. Most of all, we love them. At least most of us most of all love them.

And yet we might never really know them -- especially the ones who one day walk out of a rest room dressed in black and coldly eliminate themselves as well as those who are not their enemies; the ones who one day walk into a crowded market and boldly explode themselves and those who are not their enemies; the ones who eliminate their bothersome sibling and bury him along with their dreams.

What happens to them between us and the rest of the world? What happens to how much we love them? What happens to how much they love? What is happening to our children? What is happening to us?

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." --Carl Sagan
This was a quote nestled among the blog posts of a lively and creative student, whose site is worth checking out.

I got fixated on the quote because of a link that b!X emailed me that offers a theory, based on information that the genome project has shared, about human ancestry.

The site begins with the following statement:
In whose image was The Adam – the prototype of modern humans, Homo sapiens – created? The Bible asserts that the Elohim said: “Let us fashion the Adam in our image and after our likeness.” But if one is to accept a tentative explanation for enigmatic genes that humans possess, offered when the deciphering of the human genome was announced in mid-February, the feat was decided upon by a group of bacteria!

The site goes on to explain, in somewhat scientific detail, the composition of human DNA, beginning with this statement:
Moreover, there was hardly any uniqueness to the human genes. They are comparative to not the presumed 95 percent but to almost 99 percent of the chimpanzees, and 70 percent of the mouse. Human genes, with the same functions, were found to be identical to genes of other vertebrates, as well as invertebrates, plants, fungi, even yeast. The findings not only confirmed that there was one source of DNA for all life on Earth, but also enabled the scientists to trace the evolutionary process – how more complex organisms evolved, genetically, from simpler ones, adopting at each stage the genes of a lower life form to create a more complex higher life form – culminating with Homo sapiens.

It was here, in tracing the vertical evolutionary record contained in the human and the other analyzed genomes, that the scientists ran into an enigma. The “head-scratching discovery by the public consortium,” as Science termed it, was that the human genome contains 223 genes that do not have the required predecessors on the genomic evolutionary tree.

How did Man acquire such a bunch of enigmatic genes?

The site offers the same answer that many others have regarding "ancient astronauts." I find it as believable an explanation as any put forth by more traditional spiritualities.

Can we move from "feminism" to "humanism?"
Halley Suitt has several blog posts that cite various books and other blog posts about the struggle women still have achieving careers success on an equal basis with men -- a definition of "equal basis" that includes the sharing of family responsibilities. She hopes we are moving into a new era of "humanism" in contrast to "feminism."

I hope that she's right, although it was the feminst movement that gave women like me the personal confidence to go out and make our way in the "man's" world of work. Oddly enough, however, both the best boss and the worst boss I have ever had were both women. And, while "feminism" had nothing to do with their management styles, I must say that "humanism" did.

However, mine is a feminist success story. I was a teenager in the 50s, rebelled against those values in college, and married someone who seemed to accept me as an equal. That is, until I got pregnant immediately; then I was expected to become the wife/mother/homemaker. He made it impossible for me to pursue a career, but after we divorced, I had no problem doing that successfully and raising my kids myself as well. I have found that, in my generation, husbands often made it very difficult for their wives to have a careers while raising children. The husband expected that he would work outside the home; but if the woman did so, she was also expected to do the work inside the home as well. No wonder we succumbed to either anger or depression, and no wonder so many of us embraced the feminist movement.

It's much different for my pregnant 30-something daughter, whose husband has shared homemaking with her from the very beginning of their relationship.. He also intends to share the child care. While they haven't yet worked out how they will share the bread-winning, he is open to doing whatever will work best for the family -- from one of them staying home with the child, to their each working part-time, to one of them working full time and the other part time. That kind of equality of responsibility was rare in my generation. Perhaps many of us "feminist" women who struggled so hard have it all and realized that we couldn't, have raised sons who are aware that having it all means sharing it all.

Creating workplaces that are flexible enough to accommodate this more humanistic family unit, however, is another story. My last job (with the best boss) allowed for a great deal of flexibility for both men and women who had childen, including telecommuting, bringing kids into the office, taking emergency time off etc. etc. And she wound up with an incredibly loyal and productive staff as a result. So it can be done. But I wonder how likely it is to be done by many male managers/bosses.

Linda Lovelace died yesterday.
She died in a car accident. But that's not my point. Linda Lovelace's most famous and most degrading movie, Deep Throatwas the first porno movie I ever saw. It was on a double bill with The Devil in Miss Jones in the only movie theater in Gloucester, Maine.

One summer weekend in the mid-seventies, a female elementary school teacher friend of mine and I left our husbands with our kids and took off for a weekend on our own. We wound up in Cape Anne, Massachusetts, where we did some sightseeing, including discovering that Harry Chapin's song about "Dogtown" was based on real and really weird stuff. On our first night there we were so tired that we crashed after dinner (and wine, of course) and then set out the next day for Gloucester. Well, what can two married women do in the evening after dinner in a town where they don't know anyone? Heh. Go to the movies, of course. We had a choice of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or a double porno bill. Neither one of us had ever seen a porno movie, and no one in town knew who we were. It was a chance we couldn't pass up.

Years after, Linda Lovelace revealed the horrors that she endured as her (then) husband proceeded to get her hooked on drugs and caught in a spiral of prostitution and personal brutality. That was the reality. But for two young naive married women off on a weekend away from their every day real worlds, the fantasy was too intriguing to pass up.

It is important to know the difference between fantasy and reality.

Today
Today, I sat in my dentist’s chair for a couple of hours while he “fit me in” to make an adjustment on a bridge. But that’s not my point. My point is that all of the chairs in his rooms face a perennial garden that includes a birdbath and eight bird feeders. The large trees behind the garden are hosts to various birdhouses. So, while you sit there waiting and waiting, you can watch a colorful wildlife pageant, and you can even do so through a pair of binoculars that you find on the windowsill, along with a bird watching book.

Having grown up in a large city, I have always thought that all pigeons are gray and dirty. Today, I discovered that some have the most stunning iridescent green and purple markings, and their pewter hued feathers actually shine in sunlight. As the pigeons came and went on some sort of agreed-upon schedule, blue jays darted among the branches, and an elegant male cardinal shared the platform of a feeder with a insatiable squirrel, while a lone chipmunk and another squirrel danced around each other and the birdseed falling below. I identified a nuthatch and a downy woodpecker, and just as I was sure that the chubby robin -- who seemed to be watching me watching him -- was going to hop up and tap on the glass, I had to turn my attention to the reason why I was sitting in that chair in the first place. The bridge still isn’t right, and it’s going to take several visits, I’m sure, to fix it to my satisfaction. In the meanwhile, the garden will grow lush, and I will learn more about birds and the peaceful coexistence of the various species that mingle and mix in my thoughtful dentist’s perennial garden.

Today, the news on my local TV station reported on a local twenty-something father who shook his 2 month old daughter to death; a local thirty-something mother who purposely drowned her 4-year-old son and wanted to drown her 5-year old but he got away; and a track coach at a local high school accused of having sex with a 16 year old male student (who might not be the only kid he sodomized). And that’s just within a 30 mile radius of where I live.

We humans are supposed to be the most intelligent species on this planet. I guess intelligence has nothing to do with compassion, empathy, consideration, or love. And, looking at what’s going on in the Middle East, it certainly doesn’t seem to have much to do with respect, tolerance, cooperation, and patience either. We could learn a lot from observing life in my dentist’s perennial garden.

How to learn from the past and then let it go.
I don't have the answer to that. If I did, maybe I could get my mother to stop dwelling on all the injustices that have been done to her, personally, and to her Polish ancestry, generally, so that she might find a way to make something more positive of her own present life. She is wasting what time she has left letting her past control the way she sees her present -- which she winds up often mis-perceiving as being full of continuing personal affronts as well. I see that same pattern in certain other peoples who use past injustices as an excuse to continue feeling victimized. Sometimes the past has to be let go, or else we just continue to set up self-fulfilling destructive situations.