Savannah Lee

Speaking of that Max Q song, here are some spirits of the radio that have stuck with me:

SUNSET GRILL by Don Henley

DON'T COME AROUND HERE NO MORE by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

CHINA IN YOUR HAND by T'Pau

LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS by the Graces

MORE AND MORE by Captain Hollywood Project

LAY MY LOVE by Brian Eno

STRANGER TO LOVE by St. Paul (I would hear this in the morning in my boyfriend's college room)

SIMPLE LIFE by Elton John

THE ANGELS by Melissa Etheridge

ACCIDENT OF BIRTH by Bruce Dickinson

Here's Joan Acocella's review of Julie Kavanagh's new Nureyev biography.

Naturally, I must have it.

I've always enjoyed Joan Acocella. Her introduction to the unexpurgated diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky is a great example of the clarity and beauty of both her writing and thought. She reviews Kavanagh's book with sympathy and insight.

It's interesting to see that Nureyev's reputation is taking another downward turn. Diane Solway's generally admiring biography was a high point; now people are rethinking (again). So it goes. What's unusual about this particular period of revision is that, for the first time in my knowledge, people are attacking him for what has otherwise been considered his strength: his "wild," primal nature, his beyond-rock-star charisma. Acocella writes, "Nureyev, and the 'Nureyev phenomenon,' did not appeal to our higher instincts."

That's a criticism now.

And a timely one, considering that our main problem today is an *explosion* of not-higher-instincts ranging from a war-happy "Bring it on" President to trigger-happy Blackwater mercenaries to leash-and-hood-happy interrogators to the power-drill-enamored folks on the other side. In light of these horrific explosions of id, it's interesting to read Acocella write, "It seems to me...that there was a connection between Nureyev's lack of moral feeling and the general unintelligence of his work--both his performances and his productions." I don't think anyone would or could have made a connection like that before now. The primal, the unthinking, the animalistic, has darker associations than before. What Nureyev was onstage becomes an extension of what he was offstage--a dish-throwing megalomaniac. It's funny; after I read Solway's biography of him, I do remember putting the book down and thinking "It's lucky he became a dancer instead of a dictator." (Because a dictator, in temperament if not title, is the only kind of head of state that he could ever be.)

But what's *really* interesting about all this is its other side. Nureyev the unthinking brute animal is completely contradicted by Nureyev the highly deliberate and refined: "Nureyev found [the ordinary Soviet male dancer] ugly, so he modelled himself on the female dancers. He cultivated a highly pulled-up torso and...stood on a high half-point. Everything about him was stretched, angled, 'placed'--like a ballerina." This finicky configuration is the exact opposite of the wildness that he somehow conveyed *through* it. (Also, it was daring and innovative.)

That, of course, is why we're still writing about him. He wasn't just one thing. As with Jack Kerouac, "it is precisely his contradictions...that make him so compelling after all."

Displaced aggression, or making somebody pay if you've been hurt, turns out to be (ugh) good for you.

(A) Rats subjected to electroshocks with no outlet for their suffering developed swollen adrenal glands.

(B) Rats subjected to electroshocks in the same cage, who "took it out" by mindlessly fighting each other through their pain, did *not* develop swollen adrenal glands--they "discharged" their stress (even though really stupidly and destructively). "By passing their pain along, such animals ministered to their own needs."

(C) You do the math.

Yes--being a vengeful, horrible asshole helps you in life. Kicking the dog makes you healthier. And if you kick, not the dog, but another human being, it doesn't just lower your blood pressure, it raises your social status:

"Individuals who respond to painful situations by striking out at someone else have been more successful than those who sit back and 'take it,' because such individuals are less likely to be victimized the next time around. ...Evolution would most likely reward victims who--even if unable to retaliate against the actual perpetrator--conspicuously 'take it out' on someone else."

So what about the someone else? The one who doesn't pass it on, who doesn't kick the dog or the child or the next person to hand?

"Were you born to resist or be abused? Is someone getting the best, the best, the best, the best of you?" (Foo Fighters, "Best Of You")

Sucks.

A reader writes:

...the "dish-throwing megalomaniac" thing reminded me of the LeGuin short story called something like "those who leave Emelas", which if you haven't read I won't spoil by describing.

The story is "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," a Hugo-Award-winning classic by Ursula K. LeGuin. The fictional Omelas is a utopia which depends upon a secret: the abject suffering of a single child. When they're of age, each citizen of Omelas is made to witness the child's suffering, so that they understand the terms on which they live. Most citizens of Omelas make their peace with this, but some choose to leave.

Some people are under the impression that "Omelas" is a fantasy story. It is, in fact, an absolute description of how the world works. From school playgrounds to the global economy, this is quite literally how things are, only it's not just one kid, and we're not a utopia.

It's been a long time since I read this story, but I believe that LeGuin grants the remaining, morally compromised citizens a certain dignity; I think she describes them as being at least somewhat aware of their tragedy, and making a sad but reasoned choice that, as Spock put it, "The good of the many outweighs the good of the few, or the one."

I have come to the conclusion that she was far too kind. At least some of these people would convince themselves that the child somehow deserved its fate (it's...it's Jewish! It's black! It's gay! It's...it's...well, if people are doing this to it, and it's not even getting mad and torturing whatever bugs it can get its little hands on, then it must be *asking* for it! That's it! It's weak! It's a wussy little weenie!), proceed to give the victim a couple of kicks for good measure, feel a rush of stress-relief, social belonging, and status, and head off to have a beer.

About a year ago, I followed a link from Manolo's Shoeblog about Katie Holmes (in which he posted a picture of her staring anxiously out the window of the Odescalchi Castle and urged her, “Hurry! The guards are away!”).

It led to an Amazon.com page for the late-18th century novel “The Mysteries of Udolpho” by Ann Radcliffe. I vaguely remembered hearing about it in some course or other. It seemed interesting, so I started clicking here and there. Yes, Ann Radcliffe, legendary author, as famous and rich in her day as J.K. Rowling. Writer of the famed Gothic style of novel, a passionate, disturbing, intense form which has been called “hysterical.”

Hmm, I said to myself. I wonder how long it will take me to find out that scholars think she was gay.

Only a couple of clicks. There it was in Rictor Norton's abstract of his Radcliffe biography, *The Mistress of Udolpho*. Admitting that he is only speculating, he suggests that (a) she was a repressed lesbian and/or (b) she was sexually abused in childhood, which, he is careful to note, does not gainsay point (a).

Do literary scholars ever talk to each other? Because if they did, they might notice that not only do they think Ann Radcliffe is gay, but Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson and basically any woman who picked up a pen before 1950 and used it to write anything even slightly more character-driven than a cookbook. In each case, fevered scholars read prose such as “the most interesting female countenance she had ever seen” (Radcliffe), and decide that It Can Only Mean One Thing.

Absolutely! Because we all know how totally indifferent straight women are to each other. They never look at or admire or envy each other, or have any curiosity about or interest in each other at all. That's why there's no such thing as chick lit, soap operas, or magazines full of pictures of beautiful women wearing stylish clothes interspersed with articles about female celebrities and women's issues. Straight women hate those things.

And even if that were true, Ann Radcliffe had male readers too (which we know because at least two of them, “Byron and Shelley, plagiarized her outright”). Did it ever occur to anyone that, with her descriptions of beautiful women, she might have been aiming at them too? Not to mention the fact that this was the 19th century. How many times does Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have to remind us that it was a homosocial age? Men sat on each other's laps, held hands, and gave each other ribbons for their hair. In that context, a woman writer's description of some lovely creature or an intense female friendship is nothing out of the ordinary.

And finally, let's key in on that word 'writer.' Can we think about what that means? It means Ann Radcliffe was alive to her surroundings, to other people, to possibilities, to whispers inside moments, to doors within doors. Anyone who can only perceive things one way, who can only see one meaning in an event, who can only feel one thing at a time or occupy one perspective at a time, is not and cannot be a writer. Writers couldn't keep it going page after page and book after book if they were not Whitmanesque schizophrenics, more actors than actors, more inhabited and multifarious than Legion. Of *course* their works seem to suggest multiple layers of reality, contradictory emotions, hidden things, blah blah. Look at Homer, who was firmly on the side of Achilles, while also being firmly on the side of Agamemnon, Hector, and Briseis too. Firmly on the side of war, yet firmly on the side of peace. With this glorious insanity he wrenched our hearts so hard that we can't get away from him after three thousand years. Were Achilles and Patroclus friends or were they lovers? Yes!!

This drive, therefore, to find the “secret” which must lie behind Ann Radcliffe's intensity is really just a form of disbelief that a girl can do art. There has to be an explanation! She couldn't have written just because she was a writer. She couldn't just have been a brilliant craftsperson who knew how to get the hook in people and keep them interested. She couldn't have been romancing us. She had to be exposing herself.

That homosexuality is the explanation of choice is really just garden variety sexism. It's a symbolic way of claiming that a man wrote her books for her. Scholarly discourse is in fact extremely sexist in that way. Femininity is stripped from female writers and characters for the slightest of sins. Emily of “Udolpho” is described as “male-willed” because she wants to figure out what's happening to her and try to escape. Apparently, heterosexual women are supposed to be so poleaxed by their penetrable condition that they can't do anything at all. Any sign of independence, gumption or reasoning is “male.” Scholars claim this formulation merely *reflects* sexism; in fact, it perpetuates it.

In the end, these scholars have no imagination whatever. They've got these intense, disturbing texts and these enclosed, concealed lives and all they can read into it is repressed homosexuality or childhood abuse? Here's my theory: The scribbling Radcliffe was, of course, a serial killer. The evidence is plain. She was strikingly friendless and isolated, just like Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer. (When you've got body parts in the armoire, after all, you can't have people popping over for tea!) Consider her odd stiffness and public propriety—another hallmark! The sense of doom and repression in her texts, yet the curious attraction she evinces towards each of her characters, betrays the conflicted nature of her predation. Ecstasy cycles with guilt as she finds a new victim (symbolized in the text by each new character) and then succumbs to compulsion. Her sudden abandonment of her career means that her fame threatened to expose her activities and she had to hide.

See? I've got it all wrapped up. There are no mysteries anymore.

Isn't that what we want?

We were forced to redo our bathroom recently. (The tub cracked, and next thing we knew, we were getting a new floor.) I picked up an issue of Renovation Style magazine and was thoroughly creeped out.

First, who are all these people with the money to do this kind of renovation? This is not "I repainted the cabinets," it's "I raised the ceilings, gutted the bathroom and added a new wing." I know it's a big country, but there are *bunches* of these magazines, and they publish continuously. Has everybody with an income over 80k been approached?

Second, here's what I kept finding:

"Closed storage cabinets...work well for hiding lockable file drawers."

"A small cabinet can hide an electrical outlet."

"The beaded-board window seat hides a recycling center."

"...the kitchen, an efficient area planned to accommodate--and hide--all the appliances."

"The use of built-ins throughout the house is key to containing clutter..."

"When clutter is hidden..."

These articles use the word "hide" and its variants so often that one starts to feel the ghost of Papa Freud. People who are so eager to "hide" their recycling bins and "hide" their shoes ("Lori Leistico suggests keeping shoes and boots...in...drawers under a bench") and "hide" their file cabinets and "hide" their electrical outlets start to look like they're really interested in "hiding" themselves--from themselves. (The obsession with "hiding" and "containing" "clutter," that vague, ominous concept, is particularly telling.)

Okay...people have clutter because they *use* stuff. Furthermore: shoes, recycle bins, outlets, and cabinets, not to mention computers and TVs (always the first to get shut away in armoires when designers get hold of you), *are* the stuff of modern lives. Why don't we want to look at, and see, what we are and how we live?

I'll say it right now: my house is a pit. Don't even think about my work room; it is not just a pit, it is a *Sarlacc* pit. I have enough "clutter" in one corner to send one of these "I must hide my sin recycle bins" people to the nuthouse, pulling out their hair and screaming "Out, out, damn'd spot" all the way.

And when I read these articles, with their constant harping on "hide!" "contain!" "simple! sublime! subtle! silence!" (from the article "With Peace in Mind," that was mantra of one family's home renovation--and you want to scream "It isn't even grammatical! It should be 'simple sublime subtle SILENT' or 'SIMPLICITY SUBLIMITY SUBTLETY silence!!'")....

....I am so, so glad.

From an old Wham! interview, George Michael reports:

"I'd never bothered with my appearance, but Andrew's been aware of his appearance all his life and he influenced me. I took my glasses off and got contact lenses. I started to worry about my hair and clothes and...I couldn't believe the difference it made. People started inviting me to parties."

I've always thought it was awful that how people look could influence how they were treated to that degree. It makes me feel terrible to read things like that--terrible for that boy, and for the people who were shallow enough to change their opinions of him for that reason, and for the man who has to live with that memory of how his value was assessed. (And it wasn't like he needed more cause for loneliness in his life to begin with.)

But then everyone is lonely, I guess. And doesn't it have its own special beauty. But...not like that, not when it comes wrapped in false acceptance. I don't think it's beautiful then.

THE TRIBE OF TIGER by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. Favorite line (paraphrased from memory): "We can see that tigers are a kind of cat, but we can't seem to see the reverse--that cats are a kind of tiger."

NATASHA'S DANCE: A CULTURAL HISTORY OF RUSSIA by Orlando Figes. I love both this and his "A People's Tragedy," the history of the communist revolution. I've always loved Russia. It's completely unique with its mix of east and west, accommodating both but belonging to neither. And it's very rare for a deeply authoritarian culture (which it appears to be) to be so artistic and soulful at the same time. Plus, they're all a bunch of cowboys--they really are. (I mean that as a compliment.) You should read about their space program--those guys stuck things together with chewing gum and just went for it. Nerves. Of. Steel.

THE WIZARD IN THE TREE Lloyd Alexander. I associate this book with memories of eating party-cut cheese pizza in sixth grade, which was when I discovered it. A highly entertaining yarn with some excellent satire of hypocrisy, greed and self-satisfaction along the way.

AMAZING GRACE: THE LIVES OF CHILDREN AND THE CONSCIENCE OF A NATION by Jonathan Kozol. I read this book when it came out eleven years ago. How many more books like this are going to have to be written?

GET IN THE VAN: ON THE ROAD WITH BLACK FLAG by Henry Rollins. The most interesting part of this book in many ways is its beginning--its account of how Rollins just up and ditched his life and "got in the van," without looking back.

I go to bookstores like British gay men go to Hampstead Heath: ooh! What am I going to find tonight? Hmm, doesn't this one look interesting. Let's open up and skip to the good part.

Last night, it was Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. Cheerful subject, I know. But really fascinating.

Earlier, I blogged about the completely disgusting fact that taking it out on people is good for you: it lowers your stress and raises your social status. Partner abuse, although generally done in secret, yields the same kind of rewards, because it not only discharges stress, and not only raises your status in relation to your victim, but also supports a mindset of perfect self-justification. There's an old Eddie Murphy standup routine where he describes smacking his girlfriend. In a mock-wounded and angry voice, Murphy reports telling the woman, "I didn't want to do that. You made me do that. You brought that shit on yourself." (He describes her response as being to narrow her eyes and say "Yes yes you're right, I did bring that on myself. Now why don't you just...*go to sleep.*")

According to "Why Does He Do That," that is the abuser's mindset in a nutshell: they really do tell themselves (and others) that they are the injured party. Their partner is letting them down, messing with them, betraying them, controlling them, oppressing them, attacking them, undermining them, *wronging* them in some way, and they have to do something about it. They are defending their own personal integrity.

What could be better and sweeter than to genuinely believe that about yourself--while at the same time, enjoying the benefits of having a controlled and subordinate partner? After all, slavery is great--for the owners.

And that is why it's so extremely hard for abusers to change. Who in their right mind would want to give up a deal like that? You get to live like Napoleon while feeling like Gandhi.

Seriously, imagine giving that up. Imagine giving up both your power, on which reality as you know it has rested, *and* your belief that you're a saintly, innocent man who's just trying to keep his head above water. Absolutely everything changes; your whole world comes unmoored. You, who always thought your status was merely normal, must now (a) recognize that it was inflated and (b) give it up. You, who have always been right, have to realize you're wrong. "You mean I'm the bad guy?"

Yeah, good luck getting people to go along with that.

But, if we can learn to *spot* these guys soon enough, we can make sure they end up alone with only their pornography (to which they tend to be addicted in a negative way) to console them. Books like this will help. Frankly, I think we could stand to knock some classics off the high school English class syllabus to make room for this. An excellent piece of work.

One thing was funny--when I started browsing through it, I did not notice the name of the author at all. So I'm reading along, and I get to this very interesting personal anecdote from the author about running across the "sensitive" type of abuser at a conference. (This is the guy nobody believes could possibly be an abuser, because he's, well, sensitive and seems enlightened.) The author detected some major psychological power games coming from this particular conference attendee, took him aside, and confronted him. The guy went ballistic with self-justification, blithering about how he only shoved his girlfriend *once*--and demonstrated. On the author. (The author kicked the guy out of the conference.)

The author reported (paraphrased from memory), "The shove he gave me was hard enough that it would have shaken up most women."

I took this to mean, "It would have shaken up most women, but not me." I was intrigued. What was so different about the author, that she wasn't shaken up? Special training, maybe? I kept reading, hoping for an explanation, but none appeared in the text. I flipped to the back of the book to the author's bio in hopes of learning more.

Oh. Yes, being a man *would* explain why HE was not shaken up by that shove :)

In a sublime example of reverse sexism, I had assumed that anyone this passionate about exposing the psychology of abusers and standing with their usually-female victims would have to *be* a woman. I was wrong. Lundy Bancroft, I apologize, and you wrote a fantastic book there.

With this.

It's a series of nine personality types and their subtypes into which we allegedly all fit. ("Iconoclast" that I am, who chooses to withdraw from rules and structures and do my own thing by myself, I naturally fixate on the ways in which I *don't* fit in.)

This one's fun too; it's a series of quizzes designed to tell you if your ethics are liberal or conservative (liberals care more about "fairness" and "harm," while conservatives care more about "loyalty" and "purity"), where you stand on the OCEAN breakdown (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism), and more.

I love all these tools we use to try to create mirrors for our inner selves.

I was thinking about the wonderful movie Double Happiness, about the struggles of an Asian-Canadian actress (played by Sandra Oh). There's a beautiful, sad moment where she stands in her bedroom acting out legendary roles like Joan of Arc, knowing that she'll never really get to perform them.

The actor's problem is that they get so few chances to let it rip.

The writer's problem is that they get that chance every day :)

-Slate sidewalks, broken, weeds pushing through
-The space between the mountain laurel bushes and the front of our house
-Two little trenches in the back yard, grassed in
-Tomatoes in the neighbor's garden, sun-hot
-Watching that kitten trying to figure out what we were doing and whether it could trust us
-The local bridge, metal-green on dark clouds
-The box my dead cat was returned to us in, wrapped in her bandages
-Pulling my friend's hair because she was happy for me
-They brought my grandmother out in a wheelchair
-Not signing up for that
-Sitting in that chair outside the room where they were dancing
-Purple plastic rosary, told that it was gold
-My first midwestern highway (straight and flat)
-Train tracks with him at midnight
-Ex-friend in the doorway
-"They're really going to think we're sleeping together"
-Told I would have burned because of my eyes.

Former Eurythmics frontwoman Annie Lennox has a new album, Songs of Mass Destruction.

People have this bizarre idea that Annie Lennox is a singer. Nuh-uh. Alicia Keys is a singer. Annie Lennox is a conceptual artist. Her voice is beautiful, but it's not the whole story. *What* she sings, and how, matters more. Every time.

Eurythmics, with their often-abstract videos ("Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This," "Here Comes the Rain Again") and their evocative, mysterious lyrics ("There's a lock of hair/An invisible smoke trail/This is your shadow..."), were heaven to me. You couldn't pin them down. What *were* they? What if anything did they want? They seemed to be about those moments that happen just before or after the more conventional ones; the thing you see out of the corner of your eye and don't quite understand, the emotion you don't have a name for, the things that crop up when you're waiting and alone. Sometimes they seemed like the hallucination of a sensory-deprived brain, or an alien's view of us--complete but unrecognizable.

People seem to have forgotten how ineffable they were, how strange, in a pop landscape which was otherwise so universal in its aims. From others, you got "Cherish." "Faith." "Freedom." "I Love Rock n' Roll." "Born in the USA." "Turn Me Loose." "Love Lift Us Up Where We Belong." "Love To Love You Baby." "Love Is Love." With them, you got "Love is a *Stranger.*"

That's what they were--strangers who haunted our party, a pair of performance artists who played pop stars. On their terms.

The Stranger is still going strong, and I'm glad.

Of course it happened while we had a guest. My college roommate, a wonderful woman from Suomi (Finland), was visiting us for a few days before going on to see some other friends. We were chatting away in the front room, when the phone rang.

Here's what my former roommate saw: Me answering the phone, going stiff with shock, screaming "WHAT!? HOW?", then bursting into tears, dropping the phone, and running into the bedroom and slamming the door.

That's really what you need from your host when you're in a foreign country. My friend was very generous and supportive and tried to comfort me, but I was unhinged.

Just to make it more festive, we then had to go out to Kinko's--some kind of deadline, I don't remember what--and the poor woman had to stand there while I yelled at the store's selection of birthday cards. Why? Because they were *consoling* people for reaching ages that my friend Joe would never see. (My boyfriend, meanwhile, was doing all the actual work, since [a] it involved computers and [b] I was too busy yelling at the ingrates who think it's some kind of tragedy to turn forty.)

#

When I met Joe, he had another name. His voice was dark and gravelly and his eyes looked you over before they decided to reveal anything about themselves. He was a sweetie with people he liked and very much not with people he didn't. I never knew his instincts to be wrong. He steered both himself and other people through life that way. Once he told me to move to LA with him. I said "That place is social intrigue with a machine gun." He laughed and said "Aw, I'll protect ya." He would've, too.

At my wedding I set a place for him. I don't know quite what the restaurant owners made of that, a place being set for someone who wasn't there. It didn't seem like that happened too often.

But then, guys like Joe don't happen too often either.

The TV was at the foot of the bed, into which my dad and I were crammed. I don't remember if it was a B&B or if it was a private household, but *somebody* was putting us up for what I believe was the NAPPS (National Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Storytelling, an organization which appears not to exist anymore) festival in Jonesboro, Tennessee.

I think that on this trip, my dad was there with Bernard, his most frequent storytelling partner, although it may well have been Sam, who left the building way before Google and consequently has no digital memorial. At least I don't think he does. He might, but I can't remember his last name to help me search.

I do remember what he looked like fairly well, as long as I cut my eyes away from the memory and only glance at it sidelong. (It's the kind that would fall apart under direct scrutiny). And I remember how he said "banana." It was "BET-det-dah." (Sam and Bernard decided to skip the whole hearing thing. Which actually streamlines your life in a lot of ways. And it provided excellent karma for my hearing father, too, because when he is with deaf people, he selflessly devotes himself to them. He once stopped to help a deaf man who had been in a car accident and was having trouble with some confused and increasingly aggrieved police officers. I think his deaf friends are the ones he's closest to; they're all outriders, just in different ways.)

I had a really lucky childhood, by the way, in that respect. It's a great privilege to go downstairs and there's a deaf guy in your kitchen, or a college kid, or a scholar, or an older returning student, or a Broadway director, or a bunch of professional storytellers.

Anyhow, back to Jonesboro. I remember three things from that festival: sitting and drawing the villages of a made-up Native American tribe while the performances went on; JACKIE [INSERT HUGE CHAIN OF ADMIRING EXPLETIVES HERE] TORRANCE (here's an anecdote about her--scroll down--and by the way, Jay O'Callahan's no slouch either), and "King-tuck."

On the TV in the room I shared with my dad, I watched a cartoon show about the settling of Kentucky. One of the characters was trying to convince his wife to give up everything she'd ever known and come with him. In a distant, plummy, formal voice, she intoned, "Is it worth it, this...'Keen-tuck?'" Except her enunciation was so overdone that it sounded like 'KING-tuck.' For a few minutes I didn't even know what she was talking about, until I realized she must have meant 'Keen-tuck,' or Kentucky. Just the sound of it was so weird that it kept striking in my brain, like a hammer, over and over again, KING-tuck, KING-tuck. It is still with me.

Underneath the order of our lives and thoughts is always abstraction.

Here's some perspective on Doris Lessing and her Nobel win.

Unlike various pop stars, I am not well-read in Lessing. I did *The Golden Notebook* and that's pretty much it. I admire her contrarianism, her much-quoted "Oh christ, I couldn't care less" when told of her win. (And at 88, who can blame her?) Arguing against the idea of a literary canon, she wrote (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "The only reason to read a book is because you want to." She lived by a similar philosophy on the writing side, exploring critically-reviled genres like science fiction and fantasy in the face of the implicit pressure on her to write more "serious," "literary" works like TGN.

I did read an essay or an interview she gave quite a while ago, in which she spoke of saying goodbye to her children to go save the world. "I was absolutely sincere. There isn't much to be said for sincerity, in itself."

Doris Lessing *would*, in fact, be responsible for making the world a significantly better place, if we all would take that to heart.

Blogging about my old roommate recently has reminded me that the Finnish language has one of the best 1-10s anywhere. Forget your old, tired "un, deux, trois." Finnish has got:

uksi
kaksi
kollme
nailya
viisi
kusi
setseman
kahdeksan (and you gotta really hit that 'h,' 'kaHdeksan')
uhdeksan (ditto)
kumminen

Should you want to say goodnight, like a friendly roommate, it's "Hyvaa yota, kaunita unia." You say that "H'-VAA OO-uh-tah, ka-OO-ni-tah oo-nee-ah." It means "Goodnight, dream of angels."

While we're at it, let's honor the heritage of my husband and daughter and count 1-10 in Hawaiian:

'ekahi
'elua
'ekolu
'eha
'elima
'eono
'ehiku
'ewalu
'eiwa
'umi

Imua, Hawai'i ku!

I'll call her...hm. What would be a good name for her? A wiry girl, brown-haired, with sad eyes and a ready smile, who created herself every day out of the most amazing monologues of vintage and defiance. What she wore was way beyond mere clothes. This girl deserved to have every cover of the New York Times Style Magazine from 1983 to eternity.

If you had to make up a name for her, what would it be? You can't pick a hippie name, because her actual name was sturdy and sensible and she was *not* a hippie. Or a goth or a self-defined artiste or a member of any group at all. But you can't pick something like "Jennifer" or "Nicole" either, because her name, although grounded, was not limiting. It worked perfectly on her, it was flexible enough for her.

Hm. Yeah, that would be good, and so would that, but unfortunately those are the real names of two other old friends of mine.

Okay. I'm going to go with Jocelyn.

Jocelyn took me shopping one day--her way. Which meant we did not go to the mall. We traipsed down the big old street whose name I can't remember--Washington?--past the Dunkin Donuts and under the bridge to the Salvation Army store. There, she taught me her first and most important rule: "Don't look. Feel." She would go along the racks handling each sleeve or skirt. If she liked how something felt, *then* she'd pull it out and look at it. Otherwise, forget it.

As I dutifully practiced this technique, Jocelyn pursued her mission: she was there to find a wedding dress. I don't remember her telling me why she wanted one, and with a girl like her, it was pointless to ask anyway; the fact that she wanted it was its own explanation.

She called me over to look at the pickings. I tilted my head and said "I think Armando would like that one."

She immediately started playing along. "Yes, you're right. Armando would love it. But how about this one?"

And on and on. We had quite a time debating the opinions of Armando, the fictitious yet eager young man awaiting Jocelyn's hand. It was obviously absurd--"Armando"--so imagine our surprise when we traipsed up to the checkout counter and the lady politely wished Jocelyn luck. In fact, a whole entire conversation got going, and I actually have this memory of her looking puzzled and saying "But what about Armando?", but I can't remember what made her say it.

When we left the store, I started laughing, but Jocelyn didn't; a chill took her and she wrapped her arms around herself. "Stop," she said. "Don't." She looked around and started walking away fast. I realized that she felt, superstitiously, the power of our creation; the woman had believed in him, so in a way he was real. Jocelyn felt like he was going to come for her now.

And that was the thing--we hadn't actually liked him when we started talking about him. After all, anyone who would marry a 17-year-old girl...

I caught up to her and put my arm around her to help keep her safe from him, and we hurried back to my house.

Al Gore has won an Oscar, an Emmy and the Nobel Peace Prize.

I wish he'd won the presidency in 2000, instead of just the popular vote.

“I'm going to kiss you,” said Lana.

“Okay,” I said.

“Me too,” said Amanda.

“Okay,” I said.

They were looking at me expectantly. Something more seemed to be required.

“Should I kiss you back?” I ventured.

“No,” they said, and that was that. They left. Maybe they'd just wanted to make sure I was really amenable.

Lana and Amanda are obviously not their real names, but as you've probably gathered, they didn't mean it That Way. This was the hall of our high school, and they were talking about the upcoming National Honor Society induction ceremony. They were members, and I was shortly going to be. One of them had to put the sash over my head and the other had to hand something to me. And, as they had just informed me, they planned to kiss me too.

I swear that it was not my fault that I was getting inducted. Lana and Amanda had been in since, god, at least sophomore year, whereas now we were seniors. Every year, a letter had politely informed me that I was “not outstanding enough.” (Man, the laugh 'Paula' and I had about that when I showed her the card that one time.) And don't get the idea I was actually applying, either. Consideration was automatic.

But somehow, now, I'd been chosen. I don't know why. I didn't take it seriously—and I had seen what happened to girls who did. I was actually in the room once when a girl confronted one of the teachers about why she hadn't been chosen that year. The teacher couldn't give her a clear explanation, and the disillusioned girl went for the jugular: “I see now that this is just a political organization. You let in who you want and keep out who you don't.”

Well, I did not want to be wanted. I have vague memories of throwing things when I found out. Certainly I dragged through the whole run-up like a wet blanket.

At least there was no time to actually be forced to participate in anything. The ceremony happened in April. We graduated in June. I went to exactly one meeting. (You're scratching your head. “Shouldn't the induction for each year happen, like, at the beginning of that year?” See above, re: not taking seriously.)

But the ceremony.

I was one of the first to process. I shook the principal's hand, tightly. (Paula *and* Jocelyn had both been kicked out of school by this time and I was not happy about it.) I went across the stage and received my benediction from Lana and Amanda. Lana left an imprint of her lipstick on my cheek.

Lana and Amanda both had really unusual hair, by the way. Lana's was brown and Amanda's was black, but the texture of both was thick and curly and very soft. It floated in a gel-assisted nimbus around their heads which probably sounds bizarre but was perfect if you could only see it. Lana was an exceptionally tiny dancer who drove a stick shift; Amanda was one of our Catholic school's few Jewish students and had traveled to Italy and France.

Having been decorated and kissed, I took my seat on the stage, which was in the front row before a table which had a candle on it. There was a lot of ceremony still to come. Determined to be polite and gracious despite my boredom and my hostility towards the school administration, I decided to focus on that tiny yellow star.

I'd never meditated before, and I've never meditated since, but I can tell you that I went all the way to Nirvikalpa Samadhi in that flame. I did not hear a single word that was said on that stage. I did not move. I was *in* that bright star. There was only its light, and the darkness it cast over everything else. There was only my pride, holding myself to that point.

Fortunately I retained enough residual awareness to snap myself out of it when the ceremony was over. I walked out feeling a little bit displaced and weird, but quite good overall; I felt I had been very proper and correct and well-behaved despite my seething hostility towards the organization, the school, and life in general. (Hey, I was eighteen.)

A girl came up to me. “Oh, my god. How did you DARE?”

Another one. “You freaked us out, Savannah. How did you do that?”

Another one. Another one. Another one.

“Huh?” I said.

My act of stern politeness had come across as a single-pointed rebellion. The candle was my symbolic middle finger, which my unmoving and unblinking focus had raised to the level of some kind of curse.

I hope it was a curse of peace.

It went to J.K. Rowling this year.

There's a whole list of real and alternate winners stretching all the way back to the award's inception in 1901. (Alternate--yes, alternate--winner: Leo Tolstoy.)

Sometimes the choices are the same in both our universe and the alternate one, e.g. John Steinbeck (1962), Pablo Neruda (1971), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1982).

My own choice for the 2007 Alternate Universe Nobel in Literature would be Neil Gaiman, whose Sandman series is a masterpiece period the end goodbye. I think it embodies what the alternate Nobel is aiming for--it gives you the joy of great entertainment and the wounds of great art.

The problem is, if there really was such an award (and arguably there are several), they'd all go to the wrong people. Even when they're the right people. You know? So I think every major award needs an "alternate universe" version. I'm glad to have found this one.

He wasn't sick yet. Or at least not as sick as he would get. He was sitting in someone's house on campus, I don't remember whose, enthusing about the linguistic collisions in mixed areas of Canada where English and French speakers were in contact a lot. He'd been at a gas station and heard someone say "Checkez-vous les brakes, s'il-vous plait."

(He also told about how someone he barely knew had once called him and said "I've got this guy here and he only speaks French. Can you help?" The thing was, my friend--I'll call him Wilhelm, since in real life he does have an explosively German name, although you'll have to get that Freikorps wet dream out of your mind right now because he has long wavy brown hair and the most endearingly mongrel face--the thing was, Wilhelm *barely* spoke French at all. Nonetheless, he manfully went to the apartment and tried to help, and between his goodwill and a dictionary, they did finally get the severely misdirected Frenchman where he was going.)

"'Checkez-vous les brakes, s'il-vous plait,'" repeated Wilhelm, rolling it around on his tongue, wonkishly getting off on its wrongness and perfection.

Two years later I would go upstairs and make a call to him. Through the tube in his throat he would strangle "I love you" and then hang up.

It's funny; we were intensely together when he was sick. I called him every day. It would last three seconds: "Hi, Wilhelm, it's me." "Okay." Goodbye. He was too far gone for anything else. But though our moments together were very brief, they were crucial. For both of us.

Yet when he got better, we eased up, as if we somehow didn't quite belong in each other's regular lives. Funny how that is.

I talked to Joe a lot that year too. I never would have dreamed that Joe would be the one we'd lose. Wilhelm hung by a thread in those days, yet Joe's was already cut.

Funny how that is.

This is like that guy in Smithsonian Magazine who demonstrated that white flight *was,* in fact, white flight and not something else ("urban whites ultimately thwarted desegregation not by opposing it but by escaping it"). The question being: didn't we already know that?

(No disrespect to Mr. Kruse, who has done important work by tracking population trends and taking oral histories--but if people really think that it's a new historical insight that whites left the cities NOT because of "taxes" or "schools" but because of desegregation, then the...yes...whitewashing of our recent history has gone much further than I ever dreamed it could. And I'm a pessimist.)

So in this case...didn't we already know that feminists have better relationships? They are and always have been, after all, the ones who openly claim ownership of their bodies, the right to pleasure, and the ideal of mutual respect in their relationships with men, whether platonic or romantic. How can that do anything but enhance the fun all around?

(I say "they." It's a distancing habit. I am a feminist, defined as "subscribes to the radical notion that women are people." My tent is large; I solemnly affirm that you can be a toenail-painted rope sub and a feminist. In fact, I think if you're a toenail-painted rope sub, you'd *better* be a feminist.)

So, and no shocker here, feminists and their partners have more fun.

The best part about it is, anyone can become one, anywhere, anytime, and start reaping the benefits! "Free your mind, and the rest will follow."

I think we need an official ceremony. Something simple, like the Muslim Shahadah or the Buddhist Vandana Ti-sarana. A no-fuss way to convert, or acknowledge what already exists in you.

"I subscribe to the radical notion that women [and children] are people."

"I read Susie Bright's Journal."

"Whether it's god or the bomb, it's just the same, and it's only fear under another name."

"For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside, that it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive."

Somethin' like that.

Our infrastructure is shot.

Our people are unhealthy.

Our workers are falling behind. ("Earnings for workers with four-year degrees fell 5.2% between 2000 and 2004 when adjusted for inflation...")

We're spectacularly broke.

Our elections are coming under suspicion.

And now (sit through a free ad), our judiciary system has been overruled. (This post is long, but worth reading and giving it the time it needs to sink in--that a bunch of senators simply terminated these lawsuits by fiat.)

Draw your own conclusions about where we're headed. Or have already arrived.

That hand of his was pretty firmly lodged in his pocket. I had to use both of mine to dig it out.

We were on our way back by then; we'd followed the tracks as far as we were going to. It was midnight and we were alone.

I remember holding him by the wrist so I could get my hand around his. All that effort for what I had meant to be a brief moment. Lucky thing, too, since he actually seemed unsure how he felt about the whole thing--

--until I squeezed to let go.

He squeezed back, and held *on.* Not hard, but *deep.*

This is how it happens when you break through to a silent man.

We laced fingers.

I was so aware in those days of how he smelled. It was still new to me, like everything about him.

They called him Psycho.

The lights of the campus were coming back.

She was too young to know what it meant, but old enough to know that it wasn't good--her fish kept slamming head-first into the bottom of his bowl, then rolling over and drifting, then spazzing again.

Later on, a friend of mine told me that it was probably a stroke. I did not know that fish could have strokes. At least not fish that small.

Dennis was obviously in deep trouble. My daughter turned to me: what were we going to do?

So that was the first lesson. "Honey, I'm sorry," I said. "There's nothing we *can* do."

It was Dennis's fate to go through several more iterations of spazz-and-drift before he drifted for good.

Now came the second lesson. I had to look at my three-year-old and say "Dennis died."

Then I had to explain what that meant. I've always thought it was a design flaw that we're not born knowing. We have to be told, and it's always a nasty shock.

"Mommy," she interrupted, "that's not going to happen to *us*, is it?"

"Yes, honey. Someday it will."

She held my hand, wide-eyed, and contemplated the end of her world.

She turned to me. "Can we be buried together?"

That was all she wanted.

"Yes," I said. "We can."

So I don't know what it is about the Whitney Houston quotes. I don't even like her. But "do you want to be a singer or do you want to be a singer in show business" just says it all, and here's the other thing: she reportedly blew off a recording session on the grounds that "I ain't *feelin'* it [today]."

Now let me tell you: that is not being a diva. That is just plain fact. You are either feelin' it or you are not.

Arguably, walking off is diva-ish. She could have stayed and fought for it. But maybe she already had, and lost. It does happen.

Some days, you just...ain't...feelin' it.

I've got a character who has been to hell and back for me. I've been writing about her (and drawing pictures of her) for 25 years now. She's bigger than any one project; she's lived as many lives in as many worlds as a Michael Moorcock Multiverse creation.

When I was in school, I used to make playlists for her. (We called them “mixes” back then.) I would make word collages for her out of the lyrics. I chose songs that seemed to have something to say about her. Some would represent her inner state, others would hint at her tragic history or an aspect of her personality. Give the flavor of a man who was after her for good or ill. Some were just songs she liked to dance to. She loves to dance, you know. She keeps coming back to that, whatever time, whatever circumstances. But in all these years I've never heard her sing.

Here's her old list:

VEIL OF DECEPTION Death Angel ("The child within her died...")
LIVE TO TELL Madonna ("The light that you could never see/it shines inside, you can't take that from me")
WALK IN THE SHADOWS Queensryche ("What you say you're through with me/I'm not through with you...")
NIGHT MOVES Marilyn Martin ("Dangerous games we play, but you know I'm not afraid...")
ORIGINAL SIN Taylor Dayne ("It's not enough to make the nightmares go away...")
BLACK LODGE Anthrax ("Your heart and your soul they're bleeding")
SHE'S GOT THE LOOK Roxette
NOW IT'S MY TURN Berlin
STRANGELOVE Depeche Mode
HARD TO HANDLE The Black Crowes
ANIMAL and HYSTERIA Def Leppard

Two of them were undeveloped--little brown fetuses--but the other seven were very much alive.

She'd had them in the black-and-white chaise in my parents' bedroom, the one with the broken springs. The high armrests must have made her feel secure. It happened in the afternoon; we heard biting (her, the sacs) and squeaking (them, in shock at the world). We closed the door and left her alone for a few hours.

That's probably not what you're supposed to do anymore when your cat has kittens. Your cat, of course, is not supposed to be having kittens at *all* these days. Pet ownership has, in my humble opinion, gone berserk. Pets have to go to the vet practically as often as children. It has become expected that pets will be given preventive dental care.

This shocks me. I mean, we didn't even do anything when Helen lost a *claw* in a fight. (She seemed fine, ya know? Paw a little bloody, but she wasn't limping.) We were the old-fashioned kind of pet owners--picked 'em up from wherever, let 'em run around outdoors (and I mean they could be gone for several days), let 'em breed, brought 'em to the vet if they stopped moving for some reason. They only tended to live three to five years--but they did *live*, fighting and fucking and bringing down birds and rats and generally knowing, goddammit, that they were animals. I wouldn't want to own cats under any other circumstances. That's just me. To each his own.

When we crept to the chaise that afternoon, we saw that Helen had seven kittens at her belly, a rainbow coalition of yellow, gray, black, piebald, and even a classic tortoiseshell like Helen herself. (Helen was beautiful.) *Then* we saw that she would have had nine, if those two poor little hairless lumps over there had finished developing.

I couldn't take my eyes off them. Incomplete life. Half there. I remember it seemed like their skin was wrapped around them; I felt like I could take hold of it and peel it away. Undo them.

I didn't wonder what they would have looked like if they'd finished. They were what they were. I couldn't imagine them being anything else.

Helen took no notice of them. I don't remember who finally took them away, or what was done with them. (When was this, anyhow, thirty years ago? I think so. I think I was around eight or nine.)

A year or so later she had seven more. No stillbirths that time. Not long after, she died. The second lot were barely weaned. She'd been tough on them, a real disciplinarian, no doubt sensing that her time was short. A son of hers from the first litter took over raising them. He let them suckle his useless nipples just for comfort.

He was a patient one.

...from between my thighs in the delivery room.

That and the raging tide of Numorphan in my veins brought me back to the days when I had had the exact same question.

When I met my husband, most people around him assumed he was black. His skin was cafe-au-lait and his features looked African-American. But I had gone to a very diverse school as a kid, and I had never seen anyone with any degree of African-American heritage who had hair like his. It was stiff, smooth and blue-black. (At that time, it was too short for its natural waves to show up.)

So I asked him one day, and...

..."I'm Hawaiian," he told the ob-gyn.

"Oh really! I'm Indian," said the doc.

"Cool."

This was a welcome distraction from being poked and prodded. What I most remember about giving birth was that I just wanted everyone to leave me alone. Stop checking me, stop feeling me, stop everything. Shut up, go away, turn out the lights. It must have been some primal instinct--your reptile brain doesn't know that those hands are wearing gloves and everything is sterile.

I lost the thread of their talk (Numorphan again) and came back as the doc was cheerily saying something about "...whatever the local brown minority is." My husband was laughing.

A perfectly everyday moment during what was, of course, a perfectly everyday event.

It doesn't feel everyday. Nor should it. The entry into the world of a being who can never leave it again except by death. And no one knows what that end will be.

She was born with her eyes open.

Lips tight and eyes tighter, they called me over to them. (I don't actually remember which teachers they were, and that's probably for the best.)

"That girl who won," they told me. "Did she speak French as well as you?"

"Well, no," I said. There was a noticeable difference.

They turned and spoke a few condensed volumes to each other. Something might have been said about the different schools we came from, the winner and I. As in, she was not from a Catholic one. I got the picture that my teachers felt their students had always underperformed in these contests and were beginning to think that something more than just bad luck was operating.

They spoke to me again. "Did she act her poem out? Gestures and such?"

"Yes."

Their lips got worse. Apparently they'd been beaten by (non-Catholic) amateur dramatics before, and it pissed them off. This was supposed to be about how well you spoke the language, not how well you gestured and emoted. On top of the possible prejudice issue, they were not happy to hear that a highly active but not-all-that-well-spoken recitation had beaten She Talk Pretty.

Then they stared at me hard. "How about you? Are you okay?"

I wasn't sure what they meant. "Well, yeah."

They didn't believe me. Eyed me up and down.

It took me nearly two decades to understand that they were looking for the normal human reaction--disappointment, a share in their suspicion, anger.

I didn't have it. I just didn't. I was hopelessly indifferent. Within a week of the contest, I had lost my third-place medal. I don't even remember what the contest was, exactly, except that it involved reciting poems in foreign languages. I don't remember who sponsored it. In fact, I wasn't clear about any of this *at the time.* Only years later did it dawn on me that my teachers had looked so angry because they had actually cared about the outcome. Can you imagine?

Now I will grant you that I should have been medicated back then. I was demonstrably not okay. (My doctor had even tried to slip me the psychoactive by prescribing a "muscle relaxant" for my troubled breathing, but this did not make it past my furiously anti-medication family.) (He was livid, and in light of how things turned out subsequently, I can understand why.)

But there was something else too. I mean, just look at the poem I chose.

"Recueillement"

Sois sage, o ma Douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille.
Tu reclaimais le Soir; il descend; le voici;
Une atmosphere obscure enveloppe la ville,
Aux uns portant la paix, aux autres le souci.

Pendant que des mortels la multitude vile,
Sous le fouet du plaisir, ce bourreau sans merci,
Va cueillir des remords dans la fete servile,
Ma douleur, donne-moi la main; viens par ici,

Loin d'eux. Vois se pencher les defuntes Annees,
Sur les balcons du ciel, en robes surannees;
Surgir du fond des eaux le Regret souriant;

Le Soleil moribond s'endormir sous une arche,
Et, comme un long linceul trainant a l'Orient,
Entends, ma chere, entends la douce Nuit qui marche.

<>

"Come, my sadness, far from them. Watch the years go down and smiling regret bubble up; like a shroud trailing to the east, hear the sweet walking Night."

(There's a lot more to it than that, but that's the core.)

It would have been a travesty to "win" with a poem like that. No matter how pretty I talked, not even if I'd concurrently danced the Dying Swan and cut my own throat for the "Regret souriant" to surge out of. A travesty. Poor Baudelaire could never have tolerated such a violation of his meaning and intent.

As Delirium, iirc, put it to the stuffy Destiny in "Sandman:" "There are other tales outside your book. There are other paths outside this garden."

I don't know why I'm there.

The whole class went. But I don't know why.

The world seems very strange these days. I can feel the breath in my throat like sandpaper but I can't, somehow, form a coherent picture of what's around me. The shadows aren't normal anymore. They block all understanding.

At thirteen I weigh seventy-eight pounds. I'm unaware of how thin I am. I'm unaware of hunger. I misinterpret the sensation as queasiness and nausea, and it drives me away from rather than towards food.

I can feel each breath. I can hardly swallow. Somehow when I try, it just won't happen. To fight the pressure, I fold a leg back on the pew, keeping my knee twisted.

If you asked me what was wrong I couldn't possibly explain. This thing is wordless. It explains itself in breath and shadows. A Missalette with meanings that you just don't understand.

You're always at the funeral of a stranger.

It distorts your body and emotions, strains your relationships, and takes you down a narrow hallway to blood and pain, with the future uncertain and permanently changed.

No criticism intended here. That's its power. That's its beauty, when freely chosen.

So why isn't it right up there with all the other paths of suffering that we glamorize in this sadomasochistic culture?

Cowboys, for example. Being a cowboy is a miserable job. It is full of hours spent fixing downed fences, “pushing” cattle from pasture to pasture, and haying, which they all hate. Backbreaking labor with little or no reward and a lot of hardship--that is the basis of the cowboy legend, that's their beautiful tragedy.

Take a look at our other macho institutions—the Army, the police, doctoring and lawyering. All of them are mainstays of television writers desperate for stories. A big part of what makes them a good source of material is precisely their pain and futility. Cops, for example, start with failure: someone has been killed or harmed. And there is a very real chance that whoever did it will get away with it. Even if not, the damage has been done. What they do with this pain is their heroism.

Well, female reproduction has the vast emptiness of being a cowboy combined with the inherent tragedy of police work (we suffer to have these babies only so they themselves will suffer) *combined* with the overt, body-distorting, mind-shattering sadism of the military. What is childbirth if not blood and thunder?

Not only that, but after the sado-carnival of birth is done, motherhood picks up the ultimate analogy—drug addiction. Yep, it's time for sleep deprivation, boredom, isolation, really disturbing physical symptoms, dramatic loss of identity, and enslavement to an outside force that you love and cannot make yourself stop loving. All in a relentless press that brings to mind pictures of the emaciated Christian Bale from *The Machinist*. That sure ain't how new moms look, which is no doubt part of the PR problem, but it's how they feel.

What I'm saying here is: what's not to love? How has this stark and very real experience managed to escape the dark worship we bestow on every other kind of suffering and sacrifice? Why has it instead been made “hopeful” and “fulfilling” and “positive,” hence fatally beige?

Instead of haunting lullabies in tears, we get cuteness in the stroller. The bad part is seen as something to be survived and managed, rather than as something meaningful in itself. This denies motherhood a crucial part of its dignity.

In her book *Operating Instructions*, Anne Lamott asked why no one tells the truth about motherhood. She felt misled by the “Gerber moments” and therefore unprepared for the sheer blood and guts of getting through the day. And night. And day. And night. The hell with *What To Expect When You're Expecting*, she should have been watching the soldier movie *The Big Red One*. Its deadly final title: “This Story Has No End.”

A mother is a footsoldier on a forced march. The buddy she dies each day for is her child. Why is this terrible bond and what it brings out in us psychologized, sentimentalized and judged instead of backlit and given silence?

My thoughts were always with the slavegirl in the shadows, the one who gives the king his cup, then slips away.

I never doubted her intelligence, her sensitivity, her powers of observation or her importance to the story.

If there *was* a queen or princess, they *became* that shadowy servant under the warped and warping gaze of the lord for whom power is everything and cannot be shared.

And yet they would stay in that garden, if only its flowers would be flowers of kindness. If only they could breathe.

Maybe someone comes along with a better one, a kind garden.

Sometimes, someone comes who thinks he knows of other paths entirely. Sometimes they take his hand and run away.

And then?

This had *never* happened in all the time we'd been working with Connie and Barbara down in their beautiful city of Asheville, North Carolina. I would always end up riding home with Connie or Barbara, and usually with my dad as well.

Not that night. That night, all seventeen years of me got to ride, all by myself, with Gray.

Since this was so important to me at the time, you are probably thinking Gray (Not His Real Name) was teh hott. To me he was, but not in the way you're picturing. For that, you would have to turn to Alec (Not His Either), a member of our merry band who was in the full flower of his Polynesian-Chinese young manhood. That boy stopped traffic. Martina Navratilova woulda took a second look. And my heart did flutter when, one day, he condescended to talk with me for a while. But in the end, Alec was just a kid my age.

Gray...was a man.

If you insist, you may call him an aging hippie. He had a beard. His hair had formed itself into white-man dreds--not actual locks, but sections of hair that had become permanently fused in little rivers or snakes that streamed down from the fishing hat he always wore. He had broad, strong, useful hands which were ragged and fascinating from some kind of condition where they were always peeling. (He would bite a loose end and tear off a whole strip with his teeth.) His voice was gristle and bone. And he had stories to tell, of a somewhat different kind than his friends.

(As you've probably guessed, I had no time for pretty. In seventh grade, I sat on my grandmother's floor and stared in awe at a harsh, brutal picture of John Belushi in all his fatness, stubble, despair, UNIQUENESS, POWER, and INTELLIGENCE. I stand with the Cocteau Belle: "Ma bete! Ma bete! Donne-moi ma bete!")

Gray was a "bete" to beat 'em all. He was an electrician. He was a machinist. He built houses. He was recording all the sound for our project. He'd taught his dogs their commands in Chinese. He visited old people in the neighborhood just so that they wouldn't be alone. He'd demonstrated and marched and seen the not-softer side of the police. As shy, withdrawn, and angry as I was, I forgot it all when I thought of Gray.

Now, tonight, finally, his car was the only one with room for me. A tiny victory of chance that no one but I would ever know I'd won.

There is nothing quite like riding in the southern dark with your secret crush.

Why is it I've always felt so free in the South? Gray in Carolina. Skyroad silver in Florida, a storm smudging the highway into the clouds. Mr. Silence coming out of himself in Atlanta, sitting down at a piano in the mall and singing from his heart. That was when I knew that it was going to be for always.

Gray in Carolina, one last time.

That's from Bryan Appleyard's essay "Poetry and the English Imagination."

#

She used to check if I was home by looking through the crack in my door. I hadn't realized you could see that much through it. Finally she told me how she'd angle her head just right and peer through the split. See me sitting on my bed.

I don't know why I thought of that. I guess because it's secret, and poetry is secret. It's what you see through the crack...or it's what the crack sees through you. There you are on your bed, in light, blind to the fissure like a rabbit to the night.

I used to see that all the time at Omega. Walking back to our cabin in the dark, I'd invariably pass a rabbit tucked under a nightlamp, unseeing in the glare.

A baby rabbit sat in the road one night last spring as I drove home from my parents'. It was so small it should have been impossible. I stopped the car in the road (an extended driveway out of their development) and started towards it. Would I have to pick it up? Would that be the death of it, when the other rabbits smelled?

My approach did trigger its instincts. It ran, though in a scattered, "where now" way as opposed to the focused dive-for-cover of older and more experienced animals. It thought maybe further along the road, or no, maybe *back* along the road, or yes perhaps into the grass but *parallel* to the road, and finally, aha, into the grass *away* from the road. Towards the deep and the dark.

Back to the secret.

#

"And so, like Hamlet," concludes Appleyard, "we must defy augury and send the brats home to learn at least a sonnet a night."

...asked my husband. He'd gotten the DVD of the classic Hugh Laurie-Stephen Fry BBC show out of the library. The question was, could we watch it with our eight-year-old daughter in the room.

I looked it over. "I don't see why not," I said. Comedy of manners and all that. "If anything, she'd get bored." Which didn't seem like that big a deal, since she was involved in her own activities anyhow and not completely paying attention to the TV.

So in it went.

After about five minutes, she said, flatly, "I don't like it."

Ten: "I don't like it."

Fifteen: "Mommy, I don't like it."

Twenty: "Daddy, I don't like it."

I could tell by her voice that she wasn't just bored by it--something about it *was* bothering her. I could not for the life of me imagine what.

She did think Stephen Fry looked "evil" as Jeeves, picking up, as kids will do, all the undertones. Fry's Jeeves does indeed have something subversive and unresolved about him, and of course there was the strangeness of the very formal master/servant relationship between him and Laurie's Bertie Wooster. She had never seen anything like that before. So I could see, or thought I could see, why she was a little weirded out.

But the story itself seemed perfectly harmless--Bertie Wooster gets stuck with looking after a hapless geek by said geek's comically overbearing mother during a trip to America--so I didn't think it was bad enough to turn it off. I deployed the venerable "Go play in your room if you don't like it!" instead.

At bedtime (it's always at bedtime) I got the full story.

"Mommy? That mother...why didn't she let her son do things? Why didn't she let him out?"

Aaaaah.

The overbearing mother. This woman sashayed around with her grown son pathetically in tow, cowering and gnawing on his walking stick and generally displaying total helplessness in the face of her brusque dominance.

To a grownup, that's funny. To a kid, it's dead serious.

I mean, my god. What if your actual parents did that to you? The thought of your protector turning on you and making you a prisoner would have to be horrifying.

What's appropriate for kids is sometimes more subtle than just the obvious "Don't let them watch 'Law and Order.'" Things which are perfectly innocuous can still bother them because they see it differently than we do. The psychologically imprisoning mother. The helper with mysterious eyes.

And yet "Blackadder" didn't bother her at all :)

(...We obviously weren't watching *all* of the Blackadders...)