Monthly Archives: January 2004

Creating new lives.

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My friend, Joan (who bought that funky fantasy painting) is also a fabric artist (quilting with applique and various embellishments). Her quilts are nothing like the traditional notion, and she has exhibited locally. She is a lawyer and is going to be retiring soon so will have lots of time on her hands. And her hands make magic out of fabric.
I have a Renoir print hanging over my couch that I’ve grown tired of. I bought it during my last relationship and it reminds me of a darker time; the mat is a dark green, so even the colors are too dark for where I hope I’m heading.
So I asked Joan, who’s known me for almost 15 years, to make me a wall hanging. A portrait of me. Not a literal portrait, but her impression/expression of who I am based on all that she knows about me. I’d like it a little glittery. Maybe some snakeskin fabric nestled in among the blues and greens. A few buttons and bows thrown in, in appropriate contradiction.
Meanwhile, on February 1, we’re going to do an official ritual unveiling of the fantasy painting. A little magical brunch. I, of course, will officiate. I think we should wear our Ya-Ya hats, we six who meet often for movies and mayhem.
Also meanwhile, I’ve been in contact with a woman who teaches “free-form knitting,” which is something I want to learn, since I like to knit but want to do it with more creativity. I like clothes with varying textures. I am thinking that Joan and I should sell our unusual designs on the net. I already have a domain name. I just need a web site. I need someone to set up a simple web site with a template that I can just pop into and update, like I do my weblog. I’ve been trying to get b!X to set it up for me, but the truth is, while he’s a definite Geek, he’s not really a techie. And he’s been really busy with his own projects. He would probably let me host it on his server.
Oh well, since I don’t have any money to pay anyone to set up such a site for me, I guess that part will have to wait. Unless there’s someone reading this who might like to help. For all I know, I could set up another MT blog and do it that way. Only I never set up this one, so I don’t know how to do that either.
I love what this technology can do. I just don’t have what it takes to learn how to make it do it. I looked at the MT manual, and it’s all Geek to me. Hmmpff. I’m a writer, for goodness sake. I can interpret writing, but I can’t interpret codes and the related acronyms.
Maybe in my next life. (Heh. I don’t have that many left.)

No Flash in the Pan.

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I sat down this afternoon and finished “The Adventures of Flash Jackson.” (See previous post.) I couldn’t put it down.

As the story pointed toward its closing, an older woman/mentor (Miz Powell) gives spunky, sassy, wild girl/woman Haley (AKA Flash Jackson) some advice that I just can’t help sharing here:

“Don’t be afraid to be all the things that a woman can be…. [snip]“You can be a mother and still be Haley,” she said. “You can cook dinner for your family and still be free. I’m not saying your life is going to be independent of the people involved in it. You have to make the right decision. But you can have a baby and still be yourself. You can fulfill traditional roles if you want to, without letting them define you. Who you are will change when you have childen, of course, but you could let it be an improvement, not a detraction.”

“I don’t mean to be rude, but how do you know all this? I [Haley] said. “You never did any of those things.”

“No,” she said. “What I have done is be a woman, with all my feminine qualities intact, in a world that was run completely by men. And you know something? They appreciated it. They didn’t exactly move over and make room for me –I had to carve out my own space among them, but that was nothing different than any of them had had to do. That’s something some women don’t seem to understand. Nobody is accepted right away. Everyone has to prove themselves. The world will never make room for you– you have to make it yourself. You have to make your own place, and stick to it. And there’s nothing weak whatever about those same feminine qualities, Haley. That’s what I want you to recognize. They are not a liability. They are a strength.”

One would think that this novel was written by a woman, given the right-on Croney point of view, but it wasn’t. And adding to my delight in the book, the author, William Kowalski, brings my favorite myth, Lilith, into Haley’s final learning curve as the girl confronts her fear of snakes.

“The snake, she’d [Miz Powell] explained, is the oldest symbol of feminine power in the world. It’s not a FEMALE power — it’s a FEMININE power. Miz Powell was very clear on this point, because men and women alike have feminine energies within them — as well as masculine ones. People were too obsessed with gender these days, she said. Really, there weren’t nearly as many differences between us as we like to pretend.”

Who was this Lilith anyway? Miz Powell, ever the walking mythological dictionary, was only too happy to explain…..
[snip]
“Lilith has been many things, my dear,” said Miz Powell. “There are goddesses similar to her in Hindu culture. The Israelites knew about her even when they were nothing more than a bunch of simple nomads, thousands of years ago. She is everywhere. She has a JOB.”

“Which is?”

“She is that which does not surrender,” said Miz Powell. “She is indomitable.”
“In other words,” I thought, “she is Flash Jackson.”

Lilith and Kali. Miz Powell and Haley. And aspiring Crones. In Haley’s own terminology: LEGITHATA (ladies extremely gifted in the healing and telepathic arts).

Why not?

Winning one for the gaffer.

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“You know what a gaffe is? A gaffe is when you tell the truth when the people in Washington don’t think you should have.”
I was told that Howard Dean said that. And also
“The President wants to go to Mars. I think Mars is a great idea… I think he should be the first to go.”
I actually contributed to moveon.org’s campaign to get the winner of its “Bush in 30 Seconds” contest on as the first ad on before the Super Bowl.
It’s well worth watching all 26 of the finalists in this ad contest. If you can’t get to all of them, be sure to see the winner.
My personal fave is the “Hood Robbin'” entry.
Let’s hope it all works to win one for the truth-telling gaffer.
Go Dean!

The Adventures of Flash Jackson

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“Flash Jackson doesn’t give a flying fart what’s ladylike and what isn’t” states the main character of this novel by William Kowalski that I’m recommending even though I’m only half way through.

First of all, the main character is a spunky, sassy, horse-riding 17-year-old 0ld-Soul girl who lives in rural upstate New York and whose grandmother, a Mennonite, lives in a shack in the woods where she brews up herbs and other witchy things.

Secondly, this girl’s best friend is a 28-year old diagnosed (perhaps not totally accurately) schizophrenic who can’t dream and who has the mind of a young boy. During one of his “episodes,” as he stands with the girl before an open field, he says that he wants to build a theater there. He says:

“This will be a place where people can come and tell their stories. They’ve been silenced, Haley. It’s not right . Someone has to help them get their voice back, and I’m going to do it. [snip]

“Someone has to give them their voice back, or I don’t know what will happen. But it’ll be bad. It’s already bad. And it’s going to get worse…….The state of communication in the world today,” he said, “is very very bad……I’ll build the theater and they can come from all over. People from the whole world can come right here, and they can get onstage and tell everyone their story, and then things will be okay again. People will understand each other.”

That resonated for me with what Ken Camp has posted about today and also what Jeneane once envisioned (a kind of bloggers encampment). This is it, the stage from which people tell their stories. Blogs. The understanding is happening. Slowly, maybe, but it’s happening.

Take heart, Shelley, wherever you are.

ditto

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This is a Reader’s Comment on BuzzFlash (I don’t have the link because it was emailed to me without one.)
The Hypocrisy of Bush Investigations
A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
It amazes me the difference in how the administration requests investigations and tries to file criminal charges to anyone that is not agreeing with their views, but how much they drag their feet to the investigations that are important to the American people, like the 9/11 case or the CIA’s agent name leak….I pray that before November many more Americans follow their conscience and bring to light all the irregularities of the current administration.
Another thing that really amazes me is the fact that the Republicans have been saying for the last years that Clinton was not impeached because of the affair but the fact that Clinton LIED about it…..are our troops being killed and maimed because of the TRUTH relevant to the WMD? …Just asking.
Helloooooo……does impeachment apply in this case?
ditto…ditto…ditto…ditto…ditto…ditto…ditto…ditto

Deaf, blind and mute.

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From the end of Paul Krugman’s piece in the NY Times today about the awful truths coming out in Ron Suskind’s new book “The Price of Loyalty:”
The question is whether this book will open the eyes of those who think that anyone who criticizes the tax cuts is a wild-eyed leftist, and that anyone who says the administration hyped the threat from Iraq is a conspiracy theorist.
The point is that the credentials of the critics just keep getting better. How can Howard Dean’s assertion that the capture of Saddam hasn’t made us safer be dismissed as bizarre, when a report published by the Army War College says that the war in Iraq was a “detour” that undermined the fight against terror? How can charges by Wesley Clark and others that the administration was looking for an excuse to invade Iraq be dismissed as paranoid in the light of Mr. O’Neill’s revelations?
So far administration officials have attacked Mr. O’Neill’s character but haven’t refuted any of his facts. They have, however, already opened an investigation into how a picture of a possibly classified document appeared during Mr. O’Neill’s TV interview. This alacrity stands in sharp contrast with their evident lack of concern when a senior administration official, still unknown, blew the cover of a C.I.A. operative because her husband had revealed some politically inconvenient facts.
Some will say that none of this matters because Saddam is in custody, and the economy is growing. Even in the short run, however, these successes may not be all they’re cracked up to be. More Americans were killed and wounded in the four weeks after Saddam’s capture than in the four weeks before. The drop in the unemployment rate since its peak last summer doesn’t reflect a greater availability of jobs, but rather a decline in the share of the population that is even looking for work.
More important, having a few months of good news doesn’t excuse a consistent pattern of dishonest, irresponsible leadership. And that pattern keeps getting harder to deny.
As Paul O’Neill described, Bush and his Cabinet are deaf and blind. And, it seems, too many Americans stand mute. Feh.

Word Bowl Poem

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One of the other exercises we did in the writing session Sunday at the Glass Lake Studio (see post below) involved picking a handful of words out of a bowl full of all kinds of words that were cut out of various publications and/or printed out on small strips of paper. The idea is to use whatever words you have in your handful and turn them into a poem. Here’s what I wound up with, which came out amazingly coherent. (The words that chose me from the word bowl are bolded.)
Why waltz, I asked,
when you can whirl like a dervish,
so alive in group travels
into a common center of gravity.
This is not an orderly universe,
after all,
no easy sojourn.
So much happens behind our backs,
after all.
Why waltz,
husbanding that obscenity of repetition,
that age-old rustle
of corrupt fascism?
Instead,
germinate, condense, enthuse,
embrace like a shark,
like loping sailbirds,
foretelling the integrity
of feeling lost in the stacks.
Isn’t that cool??!!