It has been a while since I've made a sentence out of words with my hands and then put them somewhere for other people to see.
Not that long, actually.
Maybe a couple of months.
It feels like an eternity. Like I'm automatically going to ruin all of the things I'd hope to reach for because for now, right now, today and yesterday and maybe even tomorrow and definitely last month, it just wasn't happening.
As though writing is a thing you only do with your hands. As though it is only about showing someone a finish product. As those there are no problems to solve. No perspectives to shift into something more functional than useless.
There's still an itch that I get for someone else's noise in the world before the words sometimes can find a way to make noise together. There's something not quite solid about the words that come out without a net around them.
The words are still jumbled. They do not focus like a knitting pattern a few rows in. They need something different. The work is different. There are no chisels here, only sense and images and the growth of ideas, sparked into life.
Sometimes.
Monday, August 14, 2017
Friday, June 9, 2017
A Tale for Many Summers...
2 things before I
get started:
1) I am in no way a
professional write-about-theater-er, or attempting in any way to
offer meaningful critique of works of art to which I have borne
witness. This is simply earnestness as I do it.
2) Yes, I will be
writing more about all of this in a different form and with a
typewriter. If you are someone who knows that actual first line of
the piece, worry not – this is basically the abstract.
It is summer.
The world has remembered green and now reaches for fireflies like they are stars over growing things.
There are no lights
to go down, because the lights are the sun, and it will do as it
pleases.
The crowd barely
hushes because they are not crowded or looking for assigned seats or trying to
open candy before the show starts.
There is the smell
of bug spray and sunblock.
Probably there are
ducks.
With any luck, when
the wind picks up, it lifts the action of the play you and your
beloveds are watching to chaotic heights of understanding. When the
sun sets, it may lend a difficult glow to the stage where narrative
improbability gives way to humanity and vicissitude.
Tomorrow evening in
St. Louis, Missouri, I will be outside watching a play written by
Shakespeare performed on a stage with no roof but the sky, sitting
with friends and slowly being unaware of the passage of time. Also I
will probably laugh til it hurts, feel anger, frustration, awe, and
wonder. I will walk away with #TeamPaulina as hearts in my eyes and
marvel, as one does, at how much fun it is to be alive.
Ten years ago, in
Lincoln, Nebraska, I sat outside surrounded by friends and watched
The Taming of the Shrew. It
is a difficult play, and here is not where there is room to unpack
all of that, but it took me so far out of myself that I didn’t even
recognize my friend on stage or wonder at my joyful tears during that
final, terrible, speech. It gave me another way to think
about my world and reminded me to be grateful for the people in it.
Last week, the
setting and state were different and the play is The Winter’s
Tale which also deals in men and
their inability to be anything but unreasonable. This time it is the
King who ends up isolated. He does it to himself, though many people
try to talk him out of it. He
is not actually alone, of course, which this production does an
excellent job of portraying.
The Winter’sTale is a kind of difficult
play. There’s a bear, a statue, a ridiculous temper tantrum that
has horrifying consequences, and an ending that is both amazing and
also, well, let’s allow as how this production has improved things.
In my mind.
(Full
disclosure, though, the folks who put this on are going to have to
fuck up pretty royally for me not to see their summer offerings at
least twice every year. I have a list, don’t get me wrong, but, you
know, it’s not nitpicky.)
This act of sitting with friends and food and Shakespeare is one that has been a constant in my relatively tumultuous life for the last decade. It is from that place, that blanket or set of chairs or bookstore table or living room couch that my best decisions are made, and where my heart gets full.
These
solitary characters, the ones we follow in their grief or happiness
or plotting or misery, sometimes they are not the ones I see so well.
They are not the ones I recognize, the ones I have been, or ever will
be.
Usually.
Sometimes they are the abused woman living with people
who dismiss her and gaslight her and she responds with barriers and
sharpness and steel. Sometimes they are a man who sees nothing and
makes it something and becomes a monster because of it. I know these
people very very well, though one is a woman I no longer have to be
and the other is a man who has no room in my life anymore.
Forgive
me if I start to cry, but there is nothing small or insignificant
about the understanding that the people on those blankets, in those
chairs and sharing those couches are the network: the physical nets
that keep us all going together. I would not be who I am without
that. I grew up watching my parents maintain their long-distance
friendships with letters and cards and visits. Their friends are
family to me. Now, every summer brings that moment that reminds me to
look around and reach out to all of the people who are family and
have been in the glen or in the Stables for more than ten years.
The
years are lines in a poem, each one adding to the possibilities of
the ones that came before. Tomorrow I will watch this production for
the third time. I have no doubt that I will watch it at least once
more besides that. One time I will go by myself, eat too little, buy
a mug, and take my sweet time on the night ride home.
Not
this time, though. This time I get, again, to hear the laughter of
many of my loved ones and add this time to the story that keeps us
all afloat and living.
Thanks,
Flatwater Shakespeare of Lincoln, Nebraska and Shakespeare FestivalSt. Louis. There are many people in both of these places and around
the world doing work that brings us together and gives the past a way
to get into the future.
My
gratitude and love to you.
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
Respectable Puppy Fluff #1
from three weeks
In South Africa, Colonialism Was Written on Stone about the painting of a ship found 100km from the closest harbor. We know the story and this image is indelible, even though the painting itself is likely not.
from Two Bossy Dames
Demoralized Democrats have a road map for success in Trump’s America. It was written by Jesse Jackson. by Jamelle Bouie I grew up listening to and respecting this man. Get your patches together, yes?
In South Africa, Colonialism Was Written on Stone about the painting of a ship found 100km from the closest harbor. We know the story and this image is indelible, even though the painting itself is likely not.
from Two Bossy Dames
Demoralized Democrats have a road map for success in Trump’s America. It was written by Jesse Jackson. by Jamelle Bouie I grew up listening to and respecting this man. Get your patches together, yes?
They are live tweeting A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night Feb. 5th at 730pm ET; follow along (on twitter, natch) with #nightdames
from Well Read Black Girl
An Open Letter to My Sister, Miss Angela Davis by James Baldwin just, like, read it.
Their book group is reading Swing Time by Zadie Smith for February.
from Blavity
Fine, I'll Do It: 14 Quotes From Famous Revolutionary Black Women because it is A LOT we are learning to live with and we need to catch. up.
Are you listening yet to Maeve in America? She put this on her Instagram.
Here is a video of a baby takin:
Monday, November 28, 2016
An Open Newsletter
This took a turn that I did not expect and became about something entirely other than what I needed to write about. Which I do need to write about. But not there. Not right now.
So, here it is. This is what Under the Courtyard looks like most of the time, only with fewer links and more randomly lyrical musings about the places where reading happens.
On the way in
Marissa Jenae Johnson and Leslie Mac are launching the Safety Pin Box, a monthly subscription service for white people working to be allies to actively support change and Black women. The conversations about safety pins are ongoing and complicated. This is another effective way for white people (particularly white women) to put their money where their morals are. (Or, words and links where my morals are).
The setting
Today the world is much in my imagination, and too heavy to carry far into the world. The floor holds my weight as I hold Ethel's, though she offers me warmth, and I do little for the ground but walk upon it.
After the amounts and richnesses of last week, today there is slightly sweetened tea and a handful of barely flavored cookies. A large glass of water also, because it is so easy to forget to hydrate when the world is wet and falling.
To read
Newsletters are a favorite source of new writing and information. They are also challenging. Here is a person, one person, who has chosen to make a list of words in a unique order for a small group of readers who have decided on purpose to read them. Which means that whenever one appears in my inbox, it wants to be read, to be thought about and considered. I do not always send thanks to the writers, but I am getting better at it. Because they don't know, you know? Who reads, who doesn't, what it matters.
Here are some of the things I learned about from newsletters today that made room in my head:
A Man of the People by Helon Habila a short story published in Guernica magazine.
Trump: The Choice We Face by Masha Gessen a piece in The New York Review about the struggle between compromise and conscience.
Zadie Smith talking about friendships, conspiracies and musicals at LitHub.
I am not ready to digest Rebecca Solnit's Guardian essay as yet, but you might be.
Tibeb Girls - an Ethiopian animated superhero television series looks to change narratives and lives.
Developing relationships around a recognized need to do better within and for our communities expresses itself in many ways. Sometimes that way is a reading group:
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is the first book for the newly formed Activist Book Group in St. Louis.
James Baldwin's Another Country is the pick for CAM's group (also in St. Louis)
The Feminists in Love read Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed and have a plan to take time to reinvigorate and refocus in light of recent everythings.
The PoC Travel Book Club will convene in December to chat about Belonging: a Culture of Place by bell hooks.
The bookslut is starting a "radical reading reading group / potluck / anarchic sewing circle in Brooklyn" - their first reading is Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters (available for free online in its entirety).
Let's Read About Feminism is now voting for their December pick - the theme is Children's Classics.
I am reading bell hooks now and hope to attend the CAM group, and a meeting of the Activist group that is not at my old place of work. I am there far too much as it is, but that is where many of my heart are, and there is beauty in being close to the source of your love.
On the way out
Always remembering the power of honoring friendships and supporting people who support you. The pod squad at Another Round encourage each other and honor the work involved in getting the show to us. We should all hold each other up so well.
Thank you for taking the time to make room for my words every so often. It is appreciated.
Newsletters in my inbox: Reading the Tarot, Three Weeks, ...the fuck is this?, #awesomewomen, Another Round, LitHub, Here Be Monsters and others.
What are you reading, anyway?
So, here it is. This is what Under the Courtyard looks like most of the time, only with fewer links and more randomly lyrical musings about the places where reading happens.
On the way in
Marissa Jenae Johnson and Leslie Mac are launching the Safety Pin Box, a monthly subscription service for white people working to be allies to actively support change and Black women. The conversations about safety pins are ongoing and complicated. This is another effective way for white people (particularly white women) to put their money where their morals are. (Or, words and links where my morals are).
The setting
Today the world is much in my imagination, and too heavy to carry far into the world. The floor holds my weight as I hold Ethel's, though she offers me warmth, and I do little for the ground but walk upon it.
After the amounts and richnesses of last week, today there is slightly sweetened tea and a handful of barely flavored cookies. A large glass of water also, because it is so easy to forget to hydrate when the world is wet and falling.
To read
Newsletters are a favorite source of new writing and information. They are also challenging. Here is a person, one person, who has chosen to make a list of words in a unique order for a small group of readers who have decided on purpose to read them. Which means that whenever one appears in my inbox, it wants to be read, to be thought about and considered. I do not always send thanks to the writers, but I am getting better at it. Because they don't know, you know? Who reads, who doesn't, what it matters.
Here are some of the things I learned about from newsletters today that made room in my head:
A Man of the People by Helon Habila a short story published in Guernica magazine.
Trump: The Choice We Face by Masha Gessen a piece in The New York Review about the struggle between compromise and conscience.
Zadie Smith talking about friendships, conspiracies and musicals at LitHub.
I am not ready to digest Rebecca Solnit's Guardian essay as yet, but you might be.
Tibeb Girls - an Ethiopian animated superhero television series looks to change narratives and lives.
Developing relationships around a recognized need to do better within and for our communities expresses itself in many ways. Sometimes that way is a reading group:
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is the first book for the newly formed Activist Book Group in St. Louis.
James Baldwin's Another Country is the pick for CAM's group (also in St. Louis)
The Feminists in Love read Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed and have a plan to take time to reinvigorate and refocus in light of recent everythings.
The PoC Travel Book Club will convene in December to chat about Belonging: a Culture of Place by bell hooks.
The bookslut is starting a "radical reading reading group / potluck / anarchic sewing circle in Brooklyn" - their first reading is Diane di Prima's Revolutionary Letters (available for free online in its entirety).
Let's Read About Feminism is now voting for their December pick - the theme is Children's Classics.
I am reading bell hooks now and hope to attend the CAM group, and a meeting of the Activist group that is not at my old place of work. I am there far too much as it is, but that is where many of my heart are, and there is beauty in being close to the source of your love.
On the way out
Always remembering the power of honoring friendships and supporting people who support you. The pod squad at Another Round encourage each other and honor the work involved in getting the show to us. We should all hold each other up so well.
Thank you for taking the time to make room for my words every so often. It is appreciated.
Newsletters in my inbox: Reading the Tarot, Three Weeks, ...the fuck is this?, #awesomewomen, Another Round, LitHub, Here Be Monsters and others.
What are you reading, anyway?
To Read Nov 28, 2016
I have 16,000 words to write before the end of November. Naturally, I am reading everything I can get my eyes on instead.
It is a gray and rainy day, perfect for the time of year, finally, and the sharp taste of tea plus Beethoven in my ear holes means that all is in something like a kind of good spot for going forward.
President Obama wrote a lovely essay for Lonely Planet during his final foreign trip as president. Publishers Weekly offered an interesting take on why that is important. --- I am frankly, reinvigorated to travel, to read travel writing and to dig around for travel expressions wherever I find them. Go, you, Obama. Travel is a political act.
I have now seen Arrival three times in the theater. It extraordinary. Next up is to read the short story on which it is based, but that will mean leaving the house and there is tea here and also blankets, so no. Here is a piece about the design of the office of Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist.
Clearly, Saladin Ahmed is an author I NEED to read (next year when I am reading books by dudes again).
Dana Levin has a firm hold on a porch in my heart. Here she is rocking back and forth on it.
This TED Talk by Saki Mafundikwa: Ingenuity and Elegance in Ancient African Alphabets is inspiring. Humans do make some wonders, don't we? (the one after this is about African Fractals !!!)
Kimberlé Chrenshaw and the Urgency of Intersectionality. Warning: tears ahead, if yours, like mine, are white, please keep them in an appropriate place. Do your own emotional labor.
Poem from Architrave Press: From a Notebook
Some links from: LitHub, ThreeWeeks (a newsletter), Publishers Weekly, and the gentle magic of clicking around
It is a gray and rainy day, perfect for the time of year, finally, and the sharp taste of tea plus Beethoven in my ear holes means that all is in something like a kind of good spot for going forward.
President Obama wrote a lovely essay for Lonely Planet during his final foreign trip as president. Publishers Weekly offered an interesting take on why that is important. --- I am frankly, reinvigorated to travel, to read travel writing and to dig around for travel expressions wherever I find them. Go, you, Obama. Travel is a political act.
I have now seen Arrival three times in the theater. It extraordinary. Next up is to read the short story on which it is based, but that will mean leaving the house and there is tea here and also blankets, so no. Here is a piece about the design of the office of Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist.
Clearly, Saladin Ahmed is an author I NEED to read (next year when I am reading books by dudes again).
Dana Levin has a firm hold on a porch in my heart. Here she is rocking back and forth on it.
This TED Talk by Saki Mafundikwa: Ingenuity and Elegance in Ancient African Alphabets is inspiring. Humans do make some wonders, don't we? (the one after this is about African Fractals !!!)
Kimberlé Chrenshaw and the Urgency of Intersectionality. Warning: tears ahead, if yours, like mine, are white, please keep them in an appropriate place. Do your own emotional labor.
Poem from Architrave Press: From a Notebook
Some links from: LitHub, ThreeWeeks (a newsletter), Publishers Weekly, and the gentle magic of clicking around
Tuesday, November 8, 2016
Rainy election day and I had Some Thoughts
Today, in America, we vote.
Until about 6pm Central Time, my social media feeds are the joyful arrival of folks to a great party that will feed and succor them. And then the returns will start coming in and then everything will be terrible until everything isn't terrible any more. No matter who wins.
Except that it matters very much who wins. The stakes have been getting higher and higher with every presidential election in my lifetime. This year is no different. I am worried.
I spent the morning at my polling place and then at breakfast with my roommate. I went to the library to work on my NaNo novel, and then strolled home in the rain to be greeted by the cat who had just woken up and now is sitting on my desk contemplating stealing my lap.
What a lovely lovely day, I thought as I walked in the door. And how fragile it is.
Not simply the weather, which is intensely fragile and which we are consistently not caring for. Not simply the domesticated critters who we deny are complex living beings and treat as toys or trophies or props. Not simply the privilege to take time off of full-time work to pursue the being of me for a living.
My roommate and I are single women, both college-educated, both hard-working and both with no plans to become parents. Our friends are mostly single women, and of our coupled friends, only one has become a parent. Outside of St. Louis, most of my friends are married people, and only one of those couples has children, although I know that that may change. Among my friends from the various schools I've attended over the years, a huge percentage of us are either childless or single or both.
And we live in a lovely apartment, in an exciting and weird neighborhood. We are not hassled by our neighbors or set up by our acquaintance. No one in our immediate circles shames us for our lives and our choices. In fact, many of my acquaintances are equally uninterested in pursuing any relationship that ends with them not being single. We get served in restaurants. We get left alone when we go as a group to bars. My life-bro and I are frequently mistaken for a couple and seated at nicer tables and treated really kindly by waitstaff.
So life is possible. The anxieties of marriage, childbearing and family duty are not added to the anxieties of living in the world as a person just trying to live. We struggle as whole people. We succeed as whole people.
It is terrifying to look at the record of the GOP's candidate for Vice President and consider what that could mean for our ability to continue living our lives. Our otherwise inoffensive and mostly delightful lives. Our healthcare (which is already compromised as we live in a country where healthcare must be earned not assured) is likely to become even more a minefield of gaslighting and mis-diagnosis. And we're both cis-gendered ladies with no specific health issues or long-term diseases (that we know of) living in a city close to a clinic.
Violence against women has long been men's outlet for everything. What happens if someone for whom that kind of violence isn't violence at all is the person "leading" the country?
Violence against non-whites has long been white people's outlet for everything. What happens if someone for whom that kind of violence isn't violence at all is the person in The White House, leading the armed forces, responding in times of crisis and emergency?
Because to him, to his running mate, to his supporters and to many people drowning in their own concerns, the kinds of violence that marginalized people encounter on a daily basis do not count as violence.
This apartment is so quiet today. The rain makes a kind of distant waterfall effect and cards splash their way through the alley. My lap is warmer because the cat has decided to loaf on it, and these words were given expression.
There shouldn't be anything special about this experience. But there is. It shouldn't be any more fragile than any beautiful natural thing. But it is. This ought to be an available norm, and it isn't.
Many people will be the victims of violence today. Many will stand together and many will make sure that everyone's voices are heard. We will have to address the toll that centuries of oppression and environmental devastation have taken on our land, on our country, on people all around the world. Today's vote will not change that.
It will change how much quiet there is for all of us to sit, to be warm and to heal before the next round.
Vote.
Be aware.
Do better.
This circus is on us. We made it. We need to unmake it. People are dying.
Until about 6pm Central Time, my social media feeds are the joyful arrival of folks to a great party that will feed and succor them. And then the returns will start coming in and then everything will be terrible until everything isn't terrible any more. No matter who wins.
Except that it matters very much who wins. The stakes have been getting higher and higher with every presidential election in my lifetime. This year is no different. I am worried.
I spent the morning at my polling place and then at breakfast with my roommate. I went to the library to work on my NaNo novel, and then strolled home in the rain to be greeted by the cat who had just woken up and now is sitting on my desk contemplating stealing my lap.
What a lovely lovely day, I thought as I walked in the door. And how fragile it is.
Not simply the weather, which is intensely fragile and which we are consistently not caring for. Not simply the domesticated critters who we deny are complex living beings and treat as toys or trophies or props. Not simply the privilege to take time off of full-time work to pursue the being of me for a living.
My roommate and I are single women, both college-educated, both hard-working and both with no plans to become parents. Our friends are mostly single women, and of our coupled friends, only one has become a parent. Outside of St. Louis, most of my friends are married people, and only one of those couples has children, although I know that that may change. Among my friends from the various schools I've attended over the years, a huge percentage of us are either childless or single or both.
And we live in a lovely apartment, in an exciting and weird neighborhood. We are not hassled by our neighbors or set up by our acquaintance. No one in our immediate circles shames us for our lives and our choices. In fact, many of my acquaintances are equally uninterested in pursuing any relationship that ends with them not being single. We get served in restaurants. We get left alone when we go as a group to bars. My life-bro and I are frequently mistaken for a couple and seated at nicer tables and treated really kindly by waitstaff.
So life is possible. The anxieties of marriage, childbearing and family duty are not added to the anxieties of living in the world as a person just trying to live. We struggle as whole people. We succeed as whole people.
It is terrifying to look at the record of the GOP's candidate for Vice President and consider what that could mean for our ability to continue living our lives. Our otherwise inoffensive and mostly delightful lives. Our healthcare (which is already compromised as we live in a country where healthcare must be earned not assured) is likely to become even more a minefield of gaslighting and mis-diagnosis. And we're both cis-gendered ladies with no specific health issues or long-term diseases (that we know of) living in a city close to a clinic.
Violence against women has long been men's outlet for everything. What happens if someone for whom that kind of violence isn't violence at all is the person "leading" the country?
Violence against non-whites has long been white people's outlet for everything. What happens if someone for whom that kind of violence isn't violence at all is the person in The White House, leading the armed forces, responding in times of crisis and emergency?
Because to him, to his running mate, to his supporters and to many people drowning in their own concerns, the kinds of violence that marginalized people encounter on a daily basis do not count as violence.
This apartment is so quiet today. The rain makes a kind of distant waterfall effect and cards splash their way through the alley. My lap is warmer because the cat has decided to loaf on it, and these words were given expression.
There shouldn't be anything special about this experience. But there is. It shouldn't be any more fragile than any beautiful natural thing. But it is. This ought to be an available norm, and it isn't.
Many people will be the victims of violence today. Many will stand together and many will make sure that everyone's voices are heard. We will have to address the toll that centuries of oppression and environmental devastation have taken on our land, on our country, on people all around the world. Today's vote will not change that.
It will change how much quiet there is for all of us to sit, to be warm and to heal before the next round.
Vote.
Be aware.
Do better.
This circus is on us. We made it. We need to unmake it. People are dying.
Monday, November 7, 2016
You Can't Touch My Hair by Phoebe Robinson
Book Review Alert
You Can't Touch My Hair: and Other Things I Still Have To Explain by Phoebe Robinson is the book your book group really needs to read next. It is appropriate for every genre and all interests. People of all ages (maybe not the under 10s) will find much to learn from, to laugh at and to be utterly disgusted by because racism and privilege are monstrous and pervasive and holy cow. The book is a collection of essays that cover a range of horrors available to a young African-American woman living in the world today. Ms. Robinson's writing is crisp, funny and filled with references to enough pop culture that even the most easily offended nit-picker may (probably not) get through with their (his) sense of humor in tact. Also she loves Magic Mike XXL and for that reason alone is worth listening to. Because every women who loves Magic Mike and his adventures has something worthy to say. Except that she's also observant, hard-working and busy living this current iteration of her best life so had the right to even more of our attention. (Also, really, white ladies - what the hell? Why are we ever touching people's hair? Why? Stop it.)
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