Doesn’t this

and/or this

and/or this

violate some kind of copyright code?

I mean, we get it.  It’s a perfect storm of symbolism.  Yonic, bleeding mouth.  Pure white skin, drippy red stain. Dangerous parts and vulnerable parts.  Blah blah blah.  I’m just asking… can’t we think of any other ways to visually dramatize the virgin/whore obsession that drives this vampire craze?

Anyway, Happy Halloween!

I am not what you would call an ambitious person. I have aspirations: I’d like to be happy, live comfortably, earn money with work that is enjoyable and fulfilling. This is not a long-term goal: I aim to meet these needs in the present – and most days, I do. Today is not one of those days.

I am having something of a meltdown concerning the sprawling intentions of my dissertation. It’s water: on a flat surface (that would be me, while life keeps getting in the way of intellectual depth), it just wants to spread. I’m trying to scoop enough of it up to fill a 25-page glass. Wait, mixed metaphors. Never mind. I just needed a break from beating my head against it during this writing retreat, so I thought I’d turn to the comparatively finite task of filling out some paperwork for grants I’ll need next year.

Poor decision. I found myself confronted with the task of describing my career plans and goals in less than 3500 words. For those of you playing the home game, that’s about 15 double-spaced pages, five times the permissible length of the project description for this particular grant. The autobiography doesn’t need to be that long, but I’m stunned that it is allowed to be. I don’t think I could fill 15 pages with a description of where I think I’m going and what I’d like to be doing. It only took me about 16 words, above.

Feel free to compete with my astonishing concision (or lack of ambition?) by commenting in a haiku about your own career goals. Or freefrom poetry. What do I care? I am clearly a woman without delineation or direction.

Written upside-down on the back page of Timothy Morton’s The Poetics of Spice, library copy:

I would say that you know you
shouldn’t are not supposed to be
doing something ^when if someone asked
you, that you had to tell ^them a lie.

There’s a reason that I focus on scenes or images of food in literature – primarily, fiction and poetry – rather than straight-up food writing. That is, I assume there’s a reason; it’s hard for me to explain what I find so off-putting about writing that takes food for food’s sake as its primary focus. A lot of food writing tends to fall somewhere between hopelessly dull and insufferably smug – but then, so does this blog. Maybe I prefer the subtleties of allowing the poetic weight of nourishment to spin out its own story rather than putting it purposefully into a narrative of memory or discovery or whathaveyou. Maybe I am responding with an ingrained revulsion to the indulgence of taking food a proper subject matter (one of the very prejudices I rebel against by writing this stuff in the first place). Regardless, this is a genre of writing I avoid.

Take MJK Fisher. She is cited in nearly every book of food-related critical theory I have read. She was a journalist who traveled broadly and wrote prolifically and influentially (David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster is a nod to her 1941 Consider the Oyster.) She appears so frequently in food philosophy because she envisioned Good Eating as one way to access Good Living, and also because she is taken to be a superb food writer. Yet up until today I have just not been able to stand her work. I don’t know, too precious? Lots of diminutives (“little baked onions,” “little cups of decaffienized coffee”), lots of gusty prefaces to past repasts (“I can still remember…”). I’ve often commented how difficult it is to capture the frenetic movements of dancing in text; maybe it’s as difficult to capture the sequence of sensory pleasure (let alone dialogue and charm) that makes a meal. Maybe I just have an unnecessarily low tolerance for attempts.

Anyway, I began this day with a lousy morning. Rising early for another day of dissertation writing retreat, I was exhausted, achy from the previous day’s invasive medical exam, burnt out on writing, stinging with cold and wet which sank into my clothes while I waited uncomfortably for the subway, having missed one by seconds. All I carried to read was The Penguin Book of Food and Drink, which thus far had been a spectacularly disappointing collection of food writing. (Dry histories, navel-gazey paeans to regional dishes, and one hokey faux-noir detective story.) And there was MJK Fisher again, with a short piece called “I was really very hungry.” For lack of better options, this time I decided to hear what she had to say.

And I was spellbound. I sank into my subway seat and let her walk me through the dusty French countryside to a tiny inn, catered by a somewhat fanatic young woman who insisted Fisher try a little bit of everything: sizzling broiled endive, meltingly rich slices of herring, lentils in walnut oil, trout so fresh it curled in the cooking heat. Fisher could not say no to her zealous server, and so said yes to a bottle of cool white wine, a hot digestif, fresh coffee. I felt thoroughly nourished and warmed by this reel of unbelievable food, and I exited the subway with the phantom taste of the damned “little baked onions” (first simmered in broth, then braised in a little olive oil, salt, and pepper) on my tongue.

But it was still raining ice, and I remembered that all you get to eat at writing retreat is junk food and slippery cardboard sandwiches. Ouch.

Well, anyway. I did bring a pear from home, which is not quite ripe to eat but is voluptuous and russet-toned and lovely to look at. And during lunch break, I am entertaining myself by replaying my satisfying meal from late yesterday night. I’m no French chef for a country inn, but I know how to warm and comfort after a long, exhausting wet day.

As an appetizer: supple slices of white cheese on crisp rectangles of seeded wheat cracker. The cheese is a pleasant wedge of contradictions: soft and smooth, but sharp as a good white cheddar should be; cool from the refrigerator, then giving way to a slow heat as the horseradish makes itself known.
The autumnal soup should be eaten while still hot. Earlier in the week, chopped young onions were browned in butter and deglazed with tart white wine. The wine and house-made vegetable stock, brought to a boil, stewed the already-softened orange earthiness of roasted sweet potato and butternut squash. The roots and creamy roasted garlic were stirred until smooth, peppered, and speckled with parsley and thyme. This soup can be reheated again and again to soothe away the indignities of a busy, tiring week.
To finish, crisp greens with shredded carrots and chopped cauliflower in a creamy dressing. With a glass of the tart white wine, this salad ends the meal on an optimistic note: once contented and warmed by the first courses, it is easier to think about an early spring.

Reading poetry requires some suspension of disbelief. I’ve been reading Lyn Hejinian’s long poem The Fatalist; I think I love it. But to even know it I’ve had to be willing to believe that all of the words on the page are right, that they are purposeful and will make beautiful sense if I just trust that the connotative and expressive value of the words tell a story that hangs like a mist around the print. Consequently, I’ve mostly read it on the bus where it’s more difficult to wield a pen.

The best words get said frequently – they are like fertile pips.
Apples fall heavily to the ground and lie in the sun, their scent
abandoning them as a philosophy which cannot be further perfected. Love
releases playful sensations even from serious things providing a life
to think about. . .

So pretty. There are many sections of this poem in which I saw myself, or my lover, or other people we know. I folded down the corners of pages that seemed to equate language with eating (for my project) but also the ones that seemed portraitlike, as nonspecific as they are.

When I read poetry aloud, my tone is very serious – not too heavy, but purposeful and grave. It feels like carrying something very fragile in your hands: you want to have a good grip on it, but not so firm you crush it. My subvocalization sounds the same way. Try reading those few lines – how do they sound in your brain?

Then read these few lines:

The eating of one’s own progeny at a royal feast is a powerful image to be contained in a work of literature and is how Ovid’s story of Philomel and Tereus culminates in his Metamorphoses. The device is common and many revenge plays draw upon the same story from Aeschylus’s Oresteia to William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. The physical act of eating one’s offspring signifies both the cycle of revenge present within the play as well as consuming forces that drive both the protagonists and antagonists of the play.

Those are the first few sentences from one of the senior seminar papers I’m assessing (not from my own class, which does discuss cannibalism but not in Greek tragedies). I picked up this paper to read immediately after I finished The Fatalist in a coffee shop this afternoon. . . but my brain was still subvocalizing in the poem-voice. Reader, I could not find anything wrong with those sentences. It’s like I was hynotized: that paper presented itself to me in the voice of Lyn Hejinian’s long poem and I was unable to read it as anything other than authoritative and graceful.

Once I figured out what was happening, I cracked right up. Brains – so weird!

I hestitated to post this, since I don’t know about you guys but I’ve pretty much had it with news about celebrity sexual misconduct. . . but I started writing it and thought I may as well throw it out there.

I’ve mostly been ignoring David Letterman. This is nearly always my stance on adultery: I don’t care. I don’t know why I need to know this information about someone whose television show I don’t even watch. I don’t know why anyone needs to know this except his wife and of course his various sex partners. With the exception of politicians who have the sex practice of creating/supporting laws that would restrict the sex lives of other people while engaging in the unapproved sorts of sex acts him(invariably)self – that’s a good object lesson in hypocrisy – I’m really all for privacy. Let no sex act be known but unto the people involved (and a few good friends who enjoy juicy gossip, in some cases).

But I can’t completely leave it alone for a couple of reasons. Adultery coverage rankles me in part because it presumes that having sex with someone other than your legal partner is de facto a Bad Deed. I don’t care to make this assumption. Monogamy doesn’t suit everyone: some folks just don’t seem to be wired that way; maybe others have just not found their penguin-type mate yet. Regardless, many people do or will desire people other than their primary partner, and my own philosophy is that it’s a good idea to acknowledge and formalize this desire in terms that are comfortable for you. That might well be “don’t ever kiss or sexually touch anyone other than me, ever” – and that’s fine, if it works for both parties – but more often it’s going to be something like “If anything happens, tell me about it” or “don’t ask don’t tell” or, my preference, “please feel free to tell me about the desires you have, and we will talk about ways in which you can satisfy them without hurting me.” Occasionally when adultery gets a lot of media coverage, I get to wondering whether the married couple had a verbal agreement about extramarital behavior, and whether assuming they don’t is hurting cultural discussions about good sex behavior. When Elizabeth Edwards flipflopped on whether she knew about her husband’s affair before the expose (first she said she didn’t, then she said she did), could you imagine her saying to the press “Actually, yes, I knew. I even agreed to it! We’re both busy and away from home a lot, so that was our contract.”** Of course not. The outcry would be huge and weird. Much better to stick to the party lines: he’s a wayward husband, she’s a long-suffering wife. We’re kind of comfortable with those roles; we expect them and sometimes even approve of them (c.f. the wink-nudge laughs Letterman has gotten from studio audiences about his affairs. “Oh, you scoundrel.”)

What matters is not the act but the agreement. Entering a relationship is entering a social contract, and nobody can define the terms except for the two people involved. The social contract aspect raises the issue of consent – and this, to me, is the only reason to take any interest in the extramarital shenanigans of others, the only aspect of adultery that makes it a feminist issue.+ Some questions to consider: If you consent to a sexual relationship with your primary partner with the understanding that neither of you will have sexual contact with anyone else, and one partner does, what does this do to the terms of consent? Does it negate the contract? Undermine the original contract as fraudulent? And what could or should be done in such a case? The stakes are high, not just in terms of emotional safety (which matters, a lot) but in physical safety: the agreement not to take other sex partners is, in part, an agreement to protect each other from bodily harm. In poly or nonmonogamous relationships, the agreement that you may have other partners is (hopefully!) accompanied by full disclosures, disease tests as needed, etc. If you’re going to potentially introduce strange cells to your partner, they need to be fully informed about the possible risk so that they can determine their own “risk tolerance,” to borrow a phrase from that post linked before. And if they are not informed? What do we call this?

I dug around on the internet for a bit, but I’m not really sure what I’m looking for, so maybe someone could help me out: is there a legal term for obtaining consent under false pretenses? I was thinking about the recent case of a twin impersonating his brother to trick his brother’s wife into sex, but this case is being tried as sexual assault because once the wife realized that it was not her husband, she tried to stop him and was unsuccessful. (So sad, so scary.) I’m curious whether there are legal ways to address “consent under false pretenses” as an instance of fraud, or something similar. Obviously, if such things exist, they would be easiest to apply to legally recognized marriages (sigh) but I’ve occasionally wondered what the world would be like if there were way to define and enforce standards of fully informed consent. With casual sex there is always some value of “risk tolerance” as far as disease is concerned, but there’s more… suppose one agrees to protected sex, and one partner makes the protection disappear? If named, could this kind of abuse could be identified and discouraged and eliminated?

Okay. I’m interested in this, but after this discussion plays out I swear++ I’m not going to talk about sex and consent for a month. I’m just sick of it after all this.

*What? Penguins are very romantic animals!
**I’m not assuming that this was the case. Just that it’s a plausible scenario.
+There are multiple layers of consent issues in Letterman’s case, including “what does consent mean when your sex partner is not just your boss but a prominent, influential media figure?” Shakesville discusses this angle; it’s of interest to me but not what I’m discussing here.
++Not really.

Aw, damn. I opened this post in a new window and clicked a different blog in my feedreader before I had a chance to “keep as new.” But this is a good read anyway, so posting it here.

Schrodinger’s Rapist, or A Guy’s Guide to Approaching Strange Women Without Being Maced

This post links up to several discussions that have taken placed on this blog about catcallin’ or being approached by strangers: The Open Letter, which remains one of the most-visited pages here; most recently the cat-in-a-sink guy; a few others in between. I like to revive the topic of street harassment now and then because (a) hey, still happening! and (b) it’s such a clear-cut case of male privilege in action. Or perhaps entitlement is the better word. While there are certainly women who catcall and men who do not, the big pattern of men hollering at women is bolstered by a sense of specifically male entitlement to not just look, but to interrupt, to penetrate with one’s look, to impose one’s presence on a woman who ought to be flattered or at least passive rather than peeved. One of the things I like about the Schroedinger’s Rapist post is that it spells out the implications of that imposition: if a woman is sending the nonverbal cues to leave her alone (walking quickly, not looking, body turned away, etc.) and a dude overlooks these to press his case, then it just highlights how unimportant he considers her desires compared to his, and raises the chance that she will be angry or afraid. That really articulated why I felt so unsettled about the Cat in a Sink guy, enough to post about him… I mean, he was harmless, right? Just a funny line, right? Even I wasn’t sure, but he did steamroll right over my first few decline-to-accepts, and that did ruffle me.

It’s worth mentioning that not all women live day to day in the kind of fear and preparation that the author describes. Not because they shouldn’t – don’t we get messages everywhere, all the time, that it’s up to us to keep ourselves from attracting unwanted attention? – but because not everyone wants to. Or even wants to think about it that much. I like to think of myself as a competent person and a good judge of character; I prefer to trust than to fear. And I’ve gotten myself into some real scrapes that way. What I’m saying is, it takes a lot of energy to be afraid all the time, and not everyone’s going to be up for it. But that’s addressed beautifully in the “risk tolerance” section of that post. Just. . . read it.

I had my reservations, but I went on and Netflixed Perfume: Story of a Murderer after seeing that its lead actor will be playing Keats in the upcoming Bright Star. I haven’t finished it, so this is not a completely considered reaction: it is a visually striking movie; it does grimy and dark as vividly as it does brief flashes of beauty. I’m always interested in films that depict a process of artistry, especially old-fashioned ones that require a lot of rustic technology. But I couldn’t really get into this film. It became apparent so quickly that the titular murderer was a slave to his artistic passion, etc. etc., destroyed lives including his own for the love of scent, blah blah blah. So far, movie appears to be taking the sympathy-for-the-devil route: okay, so he stalked a girl and accidentally killed her. He couldn’t help it, he was impassioned! And we’re depicting how dreary and prisonlike his existence is – isn’t that condemnation enough?

It was interesting (read: off-putting) to watch this film while the fallout over Roman Polanski’s arrest is still coming down. I was only passingly acquainted with Polanski’s work or his crime prior to the arrest, but having been bombarded with information (fact and fiction) for the last few days, I am still really puzzled why there is any protest about his apprehension. Maybe folks are confusing “arrested in Zurich” with pre-trial apprehension? But this man has already pled guilty; his guilt is incontestable. That his actions were criminal is also pretty incontestable – I know some people enjoy contesting rape cases and shifting as much blame onto victims as possible, but statutory rape is pretty cut-and-dried, isn’t it? – and then he fled, which is also a crime. What’s up for debate here?

Well, apparently he’s a Great Artist. And a man of passion. Sure the law has loopholes for men like that? (Hint: all too often, it does.)

This all comes on the heels of MacKenzie Philips’ decision to become open about her father’s longterm incestuous abuse of her, which similarly garnered shock, disbelief, victim-blaming, and so forth. I don’t have any links to examples, but I remember reading a comment in which some anonymous Internetizen lamented that s/he’d never be able to hear “California Dreamin’” again without thinking of John Philips having sex with his daughter. I’m not sure what this commenter’s exact meaning was, but it’s clear enough to me that the reaction was about his/her personal relationship to the art: not reflection on the crime of abuse, not sympathy with the victim. There seems to be a common thread with the Polanski case: the public at large does not like to see their heroes fall off pedestals, perhaps? Many bloggers more eloquent than I have noted the elitism inherent to some pro-Polanski reactions: what’s the life of some slut compared to that of a Great Artist? But it seems to me that this elitism is married to a weird kind of populism, a twist on “the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” After all, if either Polanski or Philips had been punished for their abuse of women in a timely matter, we would have missed out on some Great Cinema or Timeless Pop Classics! Is it fair to deny us the enjoyment of this art? Yes, if you take into account that it is for the greatest good for the greatest number of people if the law routinely apprehends and punishes rapists and abusers. I would greatly prefer that state of things to the current state, in which the media routinely questions and punishes victims while rapists frequently get to circulate as freely as music and film.

Anyway, with all that on my mind, I’ll find it hard to finish up Perfume. Perhaps it ends brilliantly and I may never know! But I’m fairly certain I don’t need another story about a tortured genius who couldn’t be restrained by pedestrian social rules like don’t kill, don’t rape, and so forth. There is nothing original, nothing ingenious, certainly nothing artful about that.

It doesn’t take too much, really. Just show me something that I believe in, even though thousands of loud angry voices insist that it doesn’t exist.

Like fat people being active and athletic! Where “fat” = “overweight or above on the BMI index.” More will come. Check it out.

It makes me smile for the same reason that thousands of letters poured in to Glamour magazine after they printed a photo of a model with a belly. (A leetle one), but still. In both cases, it’s just plain refreshing to look at real bodies that we can relate to because we look like that or love someone who does. In the case of the Newsweek photo spread, It’s especially refreshing to see an extremely tired and oversimply myth (thinner = healthier, y’all!) get complicated by, you know, real people’s lives.

I like playing video games. That’s a fact. It feels strangely embarrassing to admit. And even though playing video games has been a bonding point in many of my long-lasting friendships – Dr. Mario with Jess, love of Elder Scrolls with Richard – it takes me some amount of time to feel comfortable sitting down with a long-term partner and introducing him to whatever I’ve been playing lately. It seems strangely illicit.

As with many things, it isn’t just a feeling; if I sense that video games are an inappropriate pasttime for a busy adult woman like myself, I am in part following the logic of the messages I get. One common and really obvious form of this message is that many games are played from a male character’s perspective. That’s been on my mind lately because I’ve been playing a game that is mostly an exception to that rule: Jade Empire, a visually stunning rendered RPG for Xbox. The gameplay is very like Fable: your character runs around in a beautifully rendered world, completing quests and advancing your skills until you are ready to encounter an archvillain, who typically wants to take over the world. Like Fable, the choices you make affect your alignment: you can play as selflessly heroic, greedy for money or power, or just plain evil. Like Fable, the story itself is based on a fantasy version of a long past society (in Fable’s case, medieval Europe, and in Jade Empire, Old China). Unlike Fable, you can choose to play as male or female, and may pursue romance with NPCs of either sex. This last detail was thrilling to discover. The women of Jade Empire are certainly sexy – so are the men – but they aren’t merely that. They tend to be complex characters whose actions are driven both by their own motives and by shifts in storyline. This makes for pleasurable playing in and of itself if you like a good character-driven story, but I reacted in amazement because it’s not all that common.

How uncommon it is became apparent when I began looking up walkthroughs for this game to see if I’d missed any side quests or cool weapons. Most of the ones I found were written in a way that reduced that racialized and sexualized the female characters. For example, the author of one walkthrough refers to the playable character’s childhood friend as an “asian porn star” and jokes about interacting with her body in a way that is not possible in gameplay – odd, since this character is refusing a man’s advances when she first appears in the storyline, and is not flirtatious as other characters are. The princess, who eventually becomes the empress, is called a “slut” in one walkthrough; another jokes that “she’s the asian kept woman you’ve always fantasized about.” I was a little shocked by all of this until I beat the game. As the credits roll, you hear the voices of a male and female character talking about their experiences being cast in video games. The male character expresses dismay that he is always cast as the dangerous loner type. The female character cheerfully explains that playing the role of the childhood friend doesn’t showcase her abilities but the venue was better than she’s used to: her describes her old acting gigs in deliberately ambiguous language that suggests she used to be a sex worker.

As I said, it doesn’t come from nowhere.

Around the same time that I began this game, I also encountered a number of blog posts by or about female gamers. I’ll link them below, but I also want to talk about games that DO feature women as well-rounded characters. This category does not necessarily include games like Morrowind, in which you can choose your character’s sex but don’t necessarily play AS a character: if you play with a first-person camera, you barely even see your character and may not remember the selected gender until you encounter a romance option (male characters may pursue a long-term romance with a catlady, and female characters might get training from a male character in exchange for a kiss). Maybe there’s something to be said for that (minus the limited romance) but I’m thinking more about games in which you either play as a strongly written female character or you interact with such characters regularly in gameplay. On Xbox, two of my favorite games fall into that category: Zoe and April in Dreamfall, Jade in Beyond Good and Evil. Still Life and Syberia 2 are also decent examples, both puzzle games in which you explore and figure out a world mainly through your female character’s eyes. I don’t know of too many others, but I’m interested in other examples and counterexamples.

If you’re interested, here are the recent links that coincided with my musing. There have been others, though I can’t go and look them up just now:
I Want To Play Too is a guest post that popped up at Shakesville while I was reflecting on the game romance.
At Sociological Images (a site well worth bookmarking!) they rounded up another set of gendered images for their ongoing discussion of gaming. Of note: an old ad for Gameboy (elsewhere on the interwebs, there has been some discussion about the ubiquity of -boy and -man in gaming device names); a comparison of internet browsers by the sexual(?) qualities they share with types of women.
Pandagon’s rumination on how being a grownup tends to mean something different for men and women: “Certainly I find that no one is surprised that my boyfriend likes to play video games, but I occasionally meet a raised eyebrow when I admit that I like to play some. . . there’s still a sense, when a woman plays, that there’s some work she should be doing.”