"We are not legislating, ladies and gentlemen, for remote unknown people - we are expanding opportunities for the happiness of our neighbours, our work colleagues, our friends, our relatives."Olé, indeed.
Oh my baby baby I love you more than I can tell
I don't think I can live without you
And I know that I never will
Oh my baby baby
I want you so it scares me to death
I can't say anymore than "I love you"
Everything else is a waste of breath
I want you
You've had your fun you don't get well no more
I want you
Your fingernails go dragging down the wall
Be careful darling you might fall
I want you
I woke up and one of us was crying
I want you
You said "Young man I do believe you're dying"
I want you
If you need a second opinion as you seem to do these days
I want you
You can look in my eyes and you can count the ways
I want you
Did you mean to tell me but seem to forget
I want you
Since when were you so generous and inarticulate
I want you
It's the stupid details that my heart is breaking for
It's the way your shoulders shake and what they're shaking for
it's knowing that he knows you now after only guessing
I want you
It's the thought of him undressing you or you undressing
I want you
He tossed some tattered compliment your way
I want you
And you were fool enough to love it when he said "I want you"
I want you
The truth can't hurt you it's just like the dark
It scares you witless
But in time you see things clear and stark
I want you
Go on and hurt me then we'll let it drop
I want you
I'm afraid I won't know where to stop
I want you
I'm not ashamed to say I cried for you
I want you
I want to know the things you did that we do too
I want you
I want to hear he pleases you more than I do
I want you
I might as well be useless for all it means to you
I want you
Did you call his name out as he held you down
I want you
Oh no my darling not with that clown
I want you
You've had your fun you don't get well no more
I want you
No-one who wants you could want you more
I want you
Every night when I go off to bed and when I wake up
I want you
I want you
I'm going to say it again 'til I instill it
I know I'm going to feel this way until you kill it
I want you
I want you
If I were at my house with my Tivo, I would slo-mo through all of them to see if I can pick out the individual episodes, but I'm temporarily visiting The Luddites' Museum Of Consumer Electronics, a.k.a. my mom's place. This month's special exhibit is the first VCR ever made. Seriously. In place of a brand name, there are the letters VCR, and if you turn it over, the serial number reads 0000001. It's in stylish brushed aluminum and was bought by my parents in the beginning of Reagan's first term. Remote control? Not happening. It only records channels two through thirteen. Remember when the entire world of television was the range of channels two through thirteen? And that was if you had cable. If I get hungry and/or wish to work out later, I'll go into the kitchen exhibit and nuke some popcorn. The microwave has a hand-crank.Song playing right now:
The internet has a wealth of information that has made a lot of reference books outdated as soon as they are published. I applaud the bravery of the librarians of Queen Mary - there are too many who want to keep at all cost. And [Gibbons'] Decline and Fall is available as a Penguin Classic - no need to panic.This is a classic case of confusing books (container) with the text (the content). I know that the text of many things can be made available via the internet; and a good thing too. I don't have a problem with that. I want democratically available texts available via as many media as possible. And I don't want to force libraries to focus on preserving books above the knowledge contained therein. But as a born archivist it saddens me to think that we are losing interest in understanding the particular histories offered by the book as a medium for preserving knowledge.
"Captain Jack Harkness [John Barrowman] is the most singularly unique character I have ever witnessed on television. He likes women. He likes men. He likes — robots. He flies around in an invisible spaceship and swoops out of the sky just in time to stop a bomb, all brawn and machismo, and in the next scene makes a catty little quip and forms an exaggerated 'W' with his fingers. Did I mention that he hides a rather large laser gun in his $#@?"
For example, one site, LegalTorrents, offers links to a wide range of music and video from creators who are happy to have their work distributed on the net. You won't find Star Wars there or Mr and Mrs Smith, but you will find The Meaty McMeat Show a "completely insane 99-minute-long animated movie that involves a diseased human organ and his colleague who travel back in time to meet a psychic talking pie".BWAH!
And how can any technology that allows such a masterpiece to be seen around the world be all bad?
Mind you, how Padmé got pregnant is anybody’s guess, although I’m prepared to wager that it involved Anakin nipping into a broom closet with a warm glass jar and a copy of Ewok Babes. After all, the Lucasian universe is drained of all reference to bodily functions. Nobody ingests or excretes. Language remains unblue. Smoking and cursing are out of bounds, as is drunkenness, although personally I wouldn’t go near the place without a hip flask. Did Lucas learn nothing from “Alien” and “Blade Runner”—from the suggestion that other times and places might be no less rusted and septic than ours, and that the creation of a disinfected galaxy, where even the storm troopers wear bright-white outfits, looks not so much fantastical as dated?And yet: I still enjoyed it. Sorry. I know that's almost a heinous crime, but some of my fellow bloggers are watching Big Brother and with excuses such as it's a "social psychology practical".
Ewan MacGregor’s opening speech in the new Star Wars:
Choose the force. Choose a side, Choose a jedi knight,
Choose a teacher,
Choose a fuckin’ big death star,
Choose star destroyers, blasters,tie-fighters and a light sabre.
Choose a black suit, black helmet and boots.
Choose a loan from Jabba the Hut.
Choose a philosophy.
Choose an Emperor.
Choose a planet with matching moon.
Choose a three planet system in the Dromoda system and fuckin’ enslave them.
Choose the Rebels and wondering who the fuck you are, kneeling by the Emperor on a Sunday morning.
Choose sitting next to that Emperor watching whole planets being enslaved in mind-controlling, force-crushing battles, stuffing fuckin’ replacement parts into your body.
Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable death star, nothing more than a dictator to the selfish, evil fucked up brats who fight for you.
Choose a future.
Choose the Force.I chose not to choose the Force.
I chose something else - I chose the Dark Side
"TELL 'EM TO STAND THE F*** UP, BEN!" Someone obviously wasn't having it. The crowd surges towards the stage and the whole room lifts, the happiness-factor (it exists!) is raised ten-fold. Ben smiles and nods like he's proud that his followers have come to join him - "The people have spoken!" he says, and starts rocking out to the fantastic 'You To Thank'. A few of the vastly-outnumbered audience members not of university age mumble about this having been advertised a 'sit down concert'. No-one cares. No-one cares because all eyes are fixed firmly on one middle-aged guy with thick-rimmed glasses breaking a piano as he hands round the Jammy Dodgers he's just been given by a fan... a roadie comes on to sort the piano, but Ben's not one for silence. Maybe he'd have told us a story if we'd been sat down, as it is, he drums out the famous riff from Nina Simone's 'Baby Don't Care' and adlibs for a good five minutes, his awesome band jamming with him in an instant. 'Looks like I f*cked up my piano', he sings, and then: ''The folks in Sheffield stand like they hate to sit down'.As someone who has in the past also stood at sit-down gigs (an especially weird demand for those in the ground floor/stalls area), I giggled at the description of the crowd being swept along with standing even though I felt for the older fans who wanted to sit down. Mind, I often think if you're gonna be seated, why not be at home? I do think that for classical music, with its softer, contemplative (and perhaps even more complex?) musical artistry, sitting down allows an appropriate attentiveness. Not that pop/rock music doesn't deserve that attentiveness, but there should be something more raw and expressive, communal even, that gets you on your feet.
We all feel a little proud.
Conclusion. There's a certain amount of a strangely fragrant and singing and dancing and calling out substance about, even (would you believe it?) in comments boxes. It emanates from perfectly intelligent people and imperfectly intelligent people both.Wonder who he was talking about though...?
Another day, another meme: and unlike some, I have to say I love them (partly because they save me having to think of topics to blog about).
Thanks to Cloud and the Communist boys for this one that I have been enjoying reading here, here, here and no doubt will enjoy reading elsewhere (like here). As Cloud illustrated though, we're running out of blog friends to tag. We need to get out more (or stay in to blog more... somehow that doesn't seem right...)
Total books owned
About 2,500 and possibly up to 3,000. I have shed a lot over the years, especially from when I was so much older (I'm younger than that now).
Last book I brought
Well we had a splurge at the weekend and I picked up Kelley Armstrong's recently published fantasy novel, Haunted. The latest in her series on witches and werewolves, they have so far been ripping/gripping page-turners. I'm saving that to accompany my journey to Keele next month when the Intellectual History Reading Group meets to discuss Susan Sontag.
Last book I read
I wizzed through Conversations with Neil Gaiman and his Collaborators: Hanging out with the Dream King by Joseph McCabe (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2004). At the moment I am reading a novel first published in hardback last year about Mary Shelley, Lady Caroline Lamb, Fanny Brawne and Augusta Leigh: Passion by Jude Morgan (London: Review, 2005). This latter one is the 'notorious' third book mentioned by Cloud.
Five books that mean a lot to me
This is sooo difficult since, like music, different books (even extracts from books) can bring to mind people, places, events and ideas. Some books are pleasureable for eclectic reasons.
Anyhow, here are some suggestions from my mind today (written 14 June 2005).
The Collected Dorothy Parker
a.k.a the Penguin, Portable or Viking Press DPYes, I was (and remain) the gauche, introvert, barbed observer of life. A "heartbreak and a wisecrack" indeed... She's probably terribly unfashionable now, and not a little problematic, but I found her entrancing when I was a frustrated and largely friendless teenager. And the one-woman performance about her life that Cloud and I saw at the Arena Theatre in Wolverhampton MANY moons ago continues to haunt me. I still really like "Symptom Recital".
Ways of Seeing by John Berger (Penguin, 1972)
NB the copy we now have is Cloud's: mine was well-battered by the years.When I did A-level art history in the 1980s, it was still considered a bit radical to teach us about art via this text (although it has now become both respected and thoroughly critiqued). But this combination of photo-essays and philosophical/Marxist writing was a thrill that made me think and look at the world of images in a different way.
Yes, Walter Benjamin became familiar to me through this.
Yes, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock's Old Mistresses (London: Pandora, 1981) made a different kind of impact regarding women artists (not just to be looked at, but active in the production of art).
Yes, there have been updates and copyists of Berger's approach. I especially like Mary Anne Staniszewski's Believing is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art (New York: Penguin, 1995).But I still take pleasure in how Berger stimulated and brought together thoughts about 'how we see.'
A Choice of Emily Dickinson's Verse selected with an introduction by Ted Hughes (London: Faber, 1968: 1986 reprint)
Maiden Speech by Eleanor Brown (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1996)Sorry, I am too torn between these two slender volumes of poetry which encapsulate different moments in my life. The first is my beautiful and much treasured collection of Emily Dickinson that Cloud purchased for my birthday in 1990, the year we met. Although later a friend brought me the complete collected works, I still have a fondness for this selection with its fiery passion and thoughtful contemplation.
My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun --
In Corners -- till a Day
The Owner passed -- identified --
And carried Me away --Nothing beats reading poetry with a loved one, and Dickinson still draws me to the soul of love.
The collection by Eleanor Brown was brought for me at a strange time in my life: negotiating a move from Wolverhampton to Coventry and on-going studies in Leeds; the dissipation of friends across the country after University. Like Parker, there is a bittersweetness to Brown's poetry; but a truth as well. Her poetry draws together classical references (a very sharp analysis of the rape so poetically alluded to in representations of Leda and the Swan; a poignant report from the perspective of Penelope: "I know you've been with other women, though. You never did that thing with my hair before") and modern-day dilemmas. If nothing else, read it for the wonderful "Fifty Sonnets": you can read at least one of sonnets in the volume Being Alive (and by the way, Staying Alive and Being Alive are perhaps amongst the best poetry anthologies released in recent years). Brown's "Fifty Sonnets" charts a relationship and its aftermath, and I've often offered a citation from it to those who have had good (and bad) relationships that have gone wrong and yet continued to haunt.
The Oxford Complete Edition: The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (undated edition, no printing information; inscribed to Gwendoline Bryant with an additional inscription beneath of 'White Sands' dated 1914-1916)
I remain a huge fan of Browning's writing, not least for the adoption of her text by Yoko Ono on the post-Lennon murder release Milk and Honey. Like Christina Rossetti, Browning's work is full of Christian symbolism (this edition was actually published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and awarded as a prize for a Divinity entrance exam). Nevertheless, or perhaps because I have a fondness for such language and expression, I do still love her work. I have only ever had poorly printed editions of her work, save for a beautiful small press printing of her Sonnnets from the Portuguese, so this is a relatively recent acquisition. But since Cloud took citation of his luscious green leather bound edition of Shelley's works (possibly a work I would save in a fire ahead of many others), I'll settle for this.
The Holy Bible, King James Edition
Not just any old copy mind, but the Chapman family bible edition that I was handed by my mother/grandmother (great-grandmother came from the Chapman clan of Lowdham, Nottinghamshire). The frontispiece pages records in my great-grandmother's handwriting the births, marriages and deaths of the Chapmans from the late 18th to the early 20th century. It's a proper 'Sunday to be read by pa-pa to the family' bible: big, quite large print and hard-cover embossed binding. So not only is it a copy of one of the key social, poetic and religious texts, it also holds a great deal of sentiment for me as an Orphan Girl.
This nearly made the list:
The Spare Rib Reader edited by Marsha Rowe (London: Penguin, 1982) Too many essays and polemics here continue to be relevant. It rather saddens me. But again, it was one of my earliest encounters with feminist ideas, and I can't thank it highly enough for that.
Sadly, no room for such favourite books as the Sandman graphic novels (though if they had come as a 10 volume box-set I may have been tempted to cheat and include that); no room either for House of Leaves: a visual and verbal delight that still scares me as I read it; no Buffy related reading (aren't you impressed?!); nor even why I love reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (and watching it!)
Five to pass this on to
This is more tricky. I'll have to go with my usual suspects in the hope they don't shoot me down in flames for meme-overload (Casyn and Anna); I'll send it to Clare because since she had all the excitement of the quiz she's kept us all gagging for a new post; I'll send it to the Wolf because I'm intrigued to know how he'll respond; and... and... oh come on... I must know more people than this :(
I've started reading Just Jane through a link on Reidski's comment box: if she's game, then hopefully she'll take up this heavy burden. Now I feel like I'm imposing myself on the blogworld...
I have neither the desire nor the will to pursue a roll-call (as reported here): as the snappy cat elegantly categorised me, I'm Pink Froth. But with heart in hand - what a gross image that is - I supplicate myself to offer a response to the comment that greeted me this morning.
Provocation can be a useful tactic: I use it too. But where does that descend into being patronising, making a confrontation for the sake of 'debate' (funny how it often descends into a slanging match or barbed wit). Still, I have chewed on it and hereby lay my 'this is my size' feminism on the table.
I think that many people (and probably I should have said people, not women) believe that to be a feminist is to be a particular type of person: for some, this is why they refute feminism. It can be perceived as a 'one-size-fits-all' ideology. I do accept that it is possible that some may believe - in either a positive or negative sense - that feminism is about women being like men, or even intending to supplant men. However, I would say from my perspective and reading that I don't believe that is what feminism is about. I accept that some have found great hope in such a notion, but I think that is flawed and problematic.
One of the central ideas of early feminism was that personal experience had a validity in commenting on the social order. Of course, one could argue that anyone can present a counter example to any research. However, academic research should ask awkward questions about where ideas come from, the validity of them and the subtle - sometimes not so subtle - messages that are expressed within research. Critical analysis is fundamental to good research because it gets readers to think about the prejudices and assumptions of the writers and their interpretation of data. Do I think that violence amongst girls and women is increasing? From an anecdotal level you can argue so; from a statistical level also you could argue so (though one might ask when these statistics started collating the figures and whether prior to this there were built in assumptions about who commits violence). But the implication of the article was that this was almost uniquely traceable to a notion of feminism; one that also specifically implied feminism was 'born' in the late 1960s. And for me this raises questions about the research and its findings.
Statistics can show just about anything: drink-driving becomes a criminal offence, cracked down on by the authorities and lo, it came to pass there was an increase in the arrests/convictions... An extreme example but I hope the point is made.
To return to my comments, I had problems with some of the language in the MSN piece because there are always (hidden) opinions in the selection of words. To barrage or bombard suggests an attack, one which few could survive or to which they could fail to succumb. The choice of "barrage" therefore raises the idea that girls could hardly fail to fall under the spell of such 'sheroes' (urgh, what a clunky term: and in its own way a perfect example of how to undermine attempts to reform sexist language). Additionally, I think "a wider range of models" is a positive thing: but I doubt that in the context of the article it was intended to be read as positive. Especially coming hard on the heels of the notion that girls are "barraged" with these options.
As far as I can, I accept personal reports and experience that things were not as they are now 50 years ago. Though we are frequently subjected to 'halcyon days' nostalgia, prevalence is an issue that cannot be ignored. But there are too many simplistic readings that equate to "then=good, now=bad" that seek to blame certain social changes for current nastiness.
For me feminism is both individual and communal: it can be nothing if it does not take account of ourselves, but it can achieve nothing if we do not seek to explore and apply ideas to the world. To see "women's concerns" as unconnected to or separate from the heart of social issues is to see women and their experiences as somehow unrelated to the social, economic and cultural ideologies that shape men and women. I really don't think that is a helpful approach and highlights the problems of binary definitions (one nearly always has the power or upper-hand in the pairing).
And as for "what kind of feminist are you?": is there a quiz to answer that? (PLEASE, please, do not send them to me). How can I answer this? Perhaps, as is my thing, a personal example will help me illustrate the question. I once worked on an exhibition called A Company of Strangers. Its intention was to highlight that feminism needed to acknowledge the heterogeneity of women alongside our connections. We were feminists both together and separately: our social, economic and cultural needs were not the same for each of us, even though there were many things as women that needed to be socially, economically and culturally tackled in society. What type of feminist am I? One who is constantly trying to understand the world and how to change it.
Best. BBC. Family. Drama. Series. Ever.
There's many women now who think, 'Surely we don't need feminism anymore, we're all liberated and society's accepting us as we are'. Which is just hogwash. It's not true at all." The jaw juts a little higher. "You know, one out of four women who go to the emergency ward are there because of domestic violence - I mean that's in America, so you can imagine how difficult it is for women in third-world countries."
How, one wonders, did feminism come to be such a dirty word? "I think most women would like to forget about it and just have babies and maybe stretch their faces or something," she laughs sharply. "Society goes through phases, like breathing - breathing in, breathing out - I think there was a time when we, women, became a little bit freer and then we got scared. We got scared of being in a position of being ostracised, I suppose."
Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um ... well, there are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Uh ... Like what ... OK ... um ... For me, uh ... ooh ... I would say ... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing ... uh ... um ... and Willie Mays ... and um ... the second movement of the Jupiter Symphony ... and, um ... Louis Armstrong's recording of Potato Head Blues ... um ... Swedish movies, naturally ... Sentimental Education by Flaubert ... uh ... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra ... um ... those incredible Apples and Pears by Cézanne ... uh ... the crabs at Sam Wo's ... uh ... Tracy's face ... "I had forgotten how much I loved that scene, and it caused me to think of similarly wonderful things that make life worth living. For me these would include the laughter of, and shared with, my closest friends/sisters; Bill Hicks, "E lucevan le stelle" from Tosca; the crescendo of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue; John William Waterhouse's The Lady of Shallot and Ophelia; Katharine Hepburn; Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese; a certain Scottish voice talking to me; and the daily sight and pleasure of life with Cloud....
Holy boob-jobs, Batman.(Actual quote accessible through the Quotes thread here).
America's DNA: Thomas L. Friedman
New Delhi June 1 2005
A few years ago my youngest daughter participated in the National History Day program for eighth graders. The question that year was "turning points" in history, and schoolchildren across the land were invited to submit a research project that illuminated any turning point in history. My daughter's project was "How Sputnik Led to the Internet." It traced how we reacted to the Russian launch of Sputnik by better networking our scientific research centers and how those early, crude networks spread and eventually were woven into the Internet. The subtext was how our reaction to one turning point unintentionally triggered another decades later.I worry that 20 years from now some eighth grader will be doing her National History Day project on how America's reaction to 9/11 unintentionally led to an erosion of core elements of American identity. What sparks such dark thoughts on a trip from London to New Delhi?
In part it is the awful barriers that now surround the U.S. Embassy in London on Grosvenor Square. "They have these cages all around the embassy now, and these huge concrete blocks, and the whole message is: 'Go away!' " said Kate Jones, a British literary agent who often walks by there. "That is how people think of America now, and it's a really sad thing because that is not your country."
In part it was a conversation with friends in London, one a professor at Oxford, another an investment banker, both of whom spoke about the hassles, fingerprinting, paperwork and costs that they, pro-American professionals, now must go through to get a visa to the U.S.In part it was a recent chat with the folks at Intel about the obstacles they met trying to get visas for Muslim youths from Pakistan and South Africa who were finalists for this year's Intel science contest. And in part it was a conversation with M.I.T. scientists about the new restrictions on Pentagon research contracts - in terms of the nationalities of the researchers who could be involved and the secrecy required - that were constricting their ability to do cutting-edge work in some areas and forcing intellectual capital offshore. The advisory committee of the World Wide Web recently shifted its semiannual meeting from Boston to Montreal so as not to put members through the hassle of getting visas to the U.S.
The other day I went to see the play "Billy Elliot" in London. During intermission, a man approached me and asked, "Are you Mr. Friedman?" When I said yes, he introduced himself - Emad Tinawi, a Syrian-American working for Booz Allen. He told me that while he disagreed with some things I wrote, there was one column he still keeps. "It was the one called, 'Where Birds Don't Fly,' " he said.
I remembered writing that headline, but I couldn't remember the column. Then he reminded me: It was about the new post-9/11 U.S. Consulate in Istanbul, which looks exactly like a maximum-security prison, so much so that a captured Turkish terrorist said that while his pals considered bombing it, they concluded that the place was so secure that even birds couldn't fly there. Mr. Tinawi and I then swapped impressions about the corrosive impact such security restrictions were having on foreigners' perceptions of America.
In New Delhi, the Indian writer Gurcharan Das remarked to me that with each visit to the U.S. lately, he has been forced by border officials to explain why he is coming to America. They "make you feel so unwanted now," said Mr. Das. America was a country "that was always reinventing itself," he added, because it was a country that always welcomed "all kinds of oddballs" and had "this wonderful spirit of openness." American openness has always been an inspiration for the whole world, he concluded. "If you go dark, the world goes dark."
Bottom line: We urgently need a national commission to look at all the little changes we have made in response to 9/11 - from visa policies to research funding, to the way we've sealed off our federal buildings, to legal rulings around prisoners of war - and ask this question: While no single change is decisive, could it all add up in a way so that 20 years from now we will discover that some of America's cultural and legal essence - our DNA as a nation - has become badly deformed or mutated?
This would be a tragedy for us and for the world. Because, as I've argued, where birds don't fly, people don't mix, ideas don't get sparked, friendships don't get forged, stereotypes don't get broken, and freedom doesn't ring.
