BLOGROLL AMNESTY DAY

(Graphic provided by ZenComix.)

I'm celebrating Blogroll Amnesty Day today for the first time. For a full explanation, see the originator Jon Swift. The short version is, it's a chance for bigger blogs to promote smaller blogs whom they read and/or wish to support. But I'm a small blog, so I'm employing the caveat that it doesn't have to be smaller than me: It just has to be choice blogs for whom I'd like to blow a celebratory horn.

Below is my "Check These Out" list. Not all of these blogs publish every day, or even every week. But I love each and every post they produce, I learn from them, I find my energy and spirits raised by reading them. Some of these bloggers have become my (cyber)friends because of exchanges we make to each other's blogs. And, it just so happens, they are all blogs created by women. Go figure.

Flip Flopping Joy -- by BrownFemiPower (whom I discovered at La Chola because of last year's B.A.D.): BFP writes about everything pertaining to the human condition, from a WOC, no limits perspective. She IS the leading edge, the event horizon.

See Saw -- by Liza Cowan at Pine Street Art Works, Burlington, Vermont: About art + retail, plus politics, pop culture, and did we mention art?



Sue Katz: Consenting Adult -- by Sue Katz: Frank talk, critical views and a belly laugh now and again



Ojibway Migisi Bineshii -- by Ojibway Migisi Bineshii: News and information about Aboriginal, First Nations, Indigenous and Native people worldwide from an Ojibway feminist perspective.

BitchCraft -- by Kat: Feminism, music, and geekiness, free of party lines or pontification.




Womanist Musings -- by Renee: Humanist, pacifist, womanist, deep deep voice against racism and classism -- thank god this woman is also raising children.

Carolyn Gage -- by Carolyn Gage: Lesbian-feminist plays, musicals, one-acts, and monologues

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HAPPY 59TH BIRTHDAY, LIZA COWAN!

Today is the birthday of my dear friend, trail-blazer and artist extraordinaire, Liza Cowan. It's not possible for me to succinctly describe the effect she's had on my life. But -- I've been mentioning her in posts for a while, so I can refer you to those, beginning with my birthday biography of her last year at Maoist Orange Cake.

Other homage and appreciation can be found at:
When It Changed
Broad Cast for 2 January 2008
Happy Anniversary, Liza!
Broad Cast Solstice 2007

plus mentions in my novel Ginny Bates, located at:
Date Myra Shows Her Face
Setting Up House
Meeting Liza Cowan
The Shopping Spree at PSAW
The Show at PSAW
Entropy
The Annotated Ginny Bates, Chapter One

Liza, a cyber adept, maintains THREE blogs: One for her art gallery, Pine Street Art Works; one for her personal art portfolio, Liza Cowan; and her latest, See Saw, about "Art, collecting, advertising, retail, architecture, public space, products, people. Wherever the ride goes." Her latest posts, about refrigerator advertising, are astute commentary on manipulation, hunger and need, masculinity/femininity, and how we got from There to Here. Please hop over to See Saw to wish her a Happy Happy, or do so in the comments here.

I dearly love you, Lize. For your vision, your tenacity, your self-love, your mothering, your eye, your belief in women, your insistence on constant growth, your abiding sense of humor, your brain as big as mine...the list is endless. May you live forever.

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POETRY ABOUT CLASS

(Caroline Atwater standing in the kitchen doorway of double one and a half story log house, North Carolina, July 1939; photograph by Dorothea Lange)

The Writer's Almanac poem for Sunday, May 18th was an evocative and sharp piece about class. I'm going to reprint it here:

EASTER MORNING

by Jim Harrison


On Easter morning all over America
the peasants are frying potatoes in bacon grease.

We're not supposed to have "peasants"
but there are tens of millions of them
frying potatoes on Easter morning,
cheap and delicious with catsup.

If Jesus were here this morning he might
be eating fried potatoes with my friend
who has a '51 Dodge and a '72 Pontiac.

When his kids ask why they don't have
a new car he says, "these cars were new once
and now they are experienced."

He can fix anything and when rich folks
call to get a toilet repaired he pauses
extra hours so that they can further
learn what we're made of.

I told him that in Mexico the poor say
that when there's lightning the rich
think that God is taking their picture.
He laughed.

Like peasants everywhere in the history
of the world ours can't figure out why
they're getting poorer. Their sons join
the army to get work being shot at.

Your ideals are invisible clouds
so try not to suffocate the poor,
the peasants, with your sympathies.
They know that you're staring at them.



I have two shelves of cookbooks, but one of the three* I prize the most is White Trash Cooking. Click on the link for a marvelous article about the book and its "aristo-dixie-queer" author, Ernest Matthew Mickler. And, in honor of the book and the poem, here's a popular recipe from the book:

TUTTI'S FRUITED PORKETTES

Ingredients:
1 pound sweet potatoes
12 slices canned pineapple
6 slices bacon, cut into halves
6 tender pork chops (or, as my Daddy's family called 'em, 'poke chops')
6 tablespoons brown sugar

Preparation:
Select sweet potatoes to makes slices a bit smaller than pineapple slices. Cut into slices one inch thick. Parboil the potatoes in salted water for 10 minutes. Place each chop between two slices of pineapple. Place slice of sweet potato on top of each pork-pineapple stack. Sprinkle each porkette with one tablespoon of brown sugar. Place bacon criss-cross on top. Place porkettes in open casserole. Bake at 375 degrees for one hour or longer, depending on thickness of chops.

Tutti, Petie's grandma, said "she learned to make porkettes by using a Hawaiian recipe combined with Southern ingredient. You cain't git trashier than that."


*Besides White Trash Cooking, The other two are The Joy of Cooking my Mama gave me when I first moved out on my own, now with stained pages and a broken binding, and Julia and Jacques: Cooking at Home.

ADDENDUM: No post on white trash or po' folks regional cooking in this country would be complete without a mention of Jello, that "other vegetable". And there's a fabulous exploration of Jello ephemera, imagery and meaning on Liza Cowan's blog, See Saw, that makes me crave cold, slippery, black cherry Jello every time I go there. Check it out at More Jello Images.

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POST-VALENTINE

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity: Romantic love and gunpowder. -- Andre Maurois

I don't celebrate Valentine's Day. I could write an essay about it, but I'll spare you. Besides, Myra and Ginny address it more humorously in a later chapter.

However, I read at Liza's blog See Saw tonight that she hearts hearts. So below, in an anti-valentine shout-out, are two heart images to share.






Me, I prefer spirals. Love them cochleas, vortices, double helices.
(Sand sculpture by Jim Denevan)

(Snail woodcut by Tugboat Printshop)

(Spiral by Alexander Calder)

(Paper art by Jen Stark)

(Spiral galaxy)

(Navaro Rapids by Ando Hiroshige)

(Chambered nautilus)

(Narceus millipede)

I also like yoni shapes, but that's another post.

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SOME NOTES ON BLOGGING

("Corfu Lights and Shadows" by John Singer Sargent, 1909, Transparent and opaque watercolor over graphite pencil on paper; a large, high-quality framed print of this has hung at the foot of my bed for 17 years, the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing at night)

At the rest of sounding like Thomas and his Friends, who are psychologically stunted around the issue of Usefulness (and avoiding public humiliation): My definition of art includes what Sharon Bridgforth refers to as "raising the energy". When I create, I seek to not only reflect my perception of reality in such a way that you have a chance at sharing the experience, but I also feel obligated to walk in beauty, to avoid anger or despair as destinations, and to weave into the fabric of my creation a belief that the viewer/reader has just as much expertise about the world as I do.

How well I achieve these goals depends on my skill level that particular day, of course. Holly Near once said that nonmonogamy was a post-patriarchal idea that we were trying to implement in a patriarchal environment. I think this goes for almost any of our best ideals: We have goals, and then we have reality. The tension between the two, the gap, can be extremely productive and even joyous if self-hatred is under control.

I bring this creative ethic to my poetry, my fiction, my essays, and my blog equally. I'm new to blogging, and have tried to learn the craft from reading others' efforts. Some conventions I follow, some I don't. For instance, I don't have a "Blogroll", I have a list of what blogs I'm actually reading regularly. I don't link to something unless I have derived good from it. No trading favors for me. I'm not in this to curry power and influence: I already have that in my life.

I also strive for graphics to accompany my text which offer an added dimension, not just illustrate my words. This means I spend a lot of time sweeping the web for interesting visuals, and my saved images files are enormous. I do my best to credit the creator of the graphic -- this isn't always possible, there's a great deal of anonymous stuff out there, but I search for origin when I have any kind of a clue.

I do this for two compelling reasons. One is the example we set for one another in the 70s, the heyday of lesbian-feminism, to credit our sources. We saw this as a behavior men did not tend to do unless legally or academically required, especially white men: For them, it was all about claiming territory by sneaking it away from others, and building ego through ideas. Our cooperative model, however, led to essays and even fiction being peppered with footnotes at the bottoms of the page, acknowledging the influence/conversation/support of another woman for our comprehension or embellishment of a particular thought. I first noticed it in the pages of DYKE: A Quarterly, but it was common in Sinister Wisdom, Common Lives Lesbian Lives, Chrysalis, Quest, Feminary, etc. Even graphic artists did this, such as Alison Bechdel in her strip Dykes To Watch Out For with her "Tip o'the nibs" squeezed into the margin.

The second reason is that I am assiduously trying to comply with the Web Accessibility guidelines spelled out at Wikipedia. Labeling a graphic means that text recognition software used by a blind computer reader, for example, can hear the caption and description of that image rather than just hitting the alphabet soup of graphics code and skipping over it. The blog server I'm using (Blogger) tends to limit my ability to create large and click-to-enlarge graphics, another accessibility recommendation, but I'm working on that as well.

As I have stated before, I avoid the practice of using some goofy riff to label a link instead of a clear description. This is an obnoxious demand that the reader either click on the link to find out what it's actually about (not all of us have the time and energy to live at our keyboards in this fashion) or ignore what might be something we really want to see. We should have enough information to make a choice. Some big-name political blogs are really terrible about this, and I've gotten into the habit of never clicking on an unclearly-labeled link. If someone won't make the effort to synopsize content into a handful of words, then it must not matter to them very much if I actually go look at it.

Conversely, I was inspired today by Liza Cowan's essay at her blog See Saw about the value of links, the revolutionary impact it's having on our discourse and our ability to not only "follow our bliss" but locate kindred souls out there in Cyberia. Liza says "Links are often my favorite part of blogs. I’ve found some of my most valuable resources by following links, not only in the body of the text but also by following the URL’s embedded in names of reader comments."

I, too, check out the profiles of someone whose work has reached me in some strong way. Ironically, although I knew Liza as a sister leader in our movement for decades, it wasn't until I saw her name in the comments section of a blog (unfortunately, not a blog which allows profiles to come through) that I was motivated to Google her down and commence one of the most rewarding relationships of my life.

(May your friendship spread all over the world -- Shen qing hou yi ji wu zhou)

I think the nature of reality is complex. Usually, more complex than we can comprehend, but dumbing it down in response is a major mistake. The truth is never simple. And art, communication, reform, atonement, any means of growth should simultaneously embrace as much of the complexity as we can see while earnestly attempting to deliver it in a comprehensible form.

One of my mentors, Terry Galloway, a genius of a playwright, dramaturg and director, always stressed that if we have been given an audience, we are not to indulge ourselves at their expense. We have a responsibility to work our asses off, to not intentionally confuse or insult them, to share with trust and goodwill. She was quite fierce about leaving adolescent embarrassment behind, and I often hear her voice in my head when I'm trying to edit a piece.

And, going off on a related tangent, here's a request: When interviewing an artist, please stop asking them the meaning of what they do. The meaning is in the piece itself, and what you get from it. Artists seem to feel compelled to answer these damfool questions with a long string of arcane solipsism which differs from the interviews with football players after a game only in vocabulary. The reason why someone wins a game is because they played better. The reason why an artist did X is because they thought it looked/sounded good. If you want to dissect the artist's psychology, point out that the reason why their faces are mostly expressionless or their conversation tangential is because they lived with a control freak molester, go right ahead but don't ask the artist to participate in it.

So, do offer me feedback and feel free to talk about anything at all in your comments, as long as its not white supremacist, woman-hating, or otherwise oppressive, and you're not simply hyping your own self. (If you do, I'll delete it swiftly.) Aim high, forgive yourself, and as Garrison Keillor says, do good work.

I leave you with a department store product page for HEMA, in the Netherlands, that is a stunning example of how creative a web catalogue can be. Wait patiently for the page to load, then keep you hands off your mouse and watch the place go wild: HEMA.

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BROAD CAST: SOLSTICE 2007

Now we are in winter.

Tomorrow a group of us are gathering for the ritual practiced over millenia by our nature- and freedom-loving ancestors. We'll build a gigantic bonfire to remind ourselves that habeus corpus will return, and to hasten her arrival, we've constructed a giant elephant from faux wicker crap on sale at Garden Ridge which we will stuff with neocons and toss onto the blaze while singing "Hairy-legged lesbians sing / glory to our cunning ling!" You're welcome to join us. Bring your own jello salad.

(Postcard for Pine Street Art Works, copyright 2007 Liza Cowan.)

Speaking of Jell-o: Liza Cowan has at last begun her own blog, See Saw, concerning art and retail (as only Liza the Dyke Mother can do it). An auspicious sign of the year to come.


December 22nd is also Global Orgasm Day. Please contribute as best you are able. If you need help, reach out to live members of your community. Consensually, of course.

And I will award 50 (FIFTY) Sistahood points to anyone who can make the link between the graphic preceding this announcement (the cover of Marilyn Gayle's book) and why it is appropriate to the day in question.


Also, in the Old News For Some Of Us Department:

Jodie Foster acknowledges her female partner. After fifteen years.

Why is this news? I mean, here's a matching headline for you: Eva Longoria, Heterosexual!

Nobody with any depth of experience is buying that you were simply "protecting your privacy" -- not when you have two turkeybaster kids and managed to at least confirm their existence without rupturing your veil of mystery.

Nope, it's obvious that you were scared. And that you still are.

Good luck with that, honey. Next....


Returning to our obsession with all things polar exploration-esque: BBC News announces "Penguin sketches made by Captain Scott and Ernest Shackleton have been found in a basement at Cambridge University. The legendary explorers drew the pictures on blackboards, probably for public lectures, in 1904 and 1909." I, of course, immediately discerned character-revealing differences between the two sketches and have been moodily examining them for further illumination. Anyone else similarly afflicted?

(Image from Julie's Magic Light Show.)

In past posts here, I've written about waking up during surgery and other complications of anesthesia. There's a new movie out now, called Awake, which addresses the issue of "anesthesia awareness". The New York Times review states this "occurs when patients wake up during surgery because they are underanesthetized. In real life, these periods are generally brief. But the patient can indeed feel pain, ranging from minor to unendurable."

Ever since the late 1980s, with the advent of PET scans and other forms of advanced imaging studies, our ability to study the human brain has catapulted forward, and if it seems like new insights about consciousness and brain function arrive weekly, that's largely accurate. This week, the PBS series Wired Science aired a segment entitled Mixed Feelings: Helping The Blind See With Their Tongue. To quote from the website (which also has video and other links):

"Most of us see with our eyes, but what if we could see with other parts of our body, too? The idea may seem ridiculous, but it's already been done. Nearly a half-century ago, maverick neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita discovered that it was possible to 'rewire' the adult brain, connecting regions in ways no one ever had imagined. Today, his ideas have given a handful of blind people the ability to see for the first time—using their tongues.

"For a long time, scientists believed that after childhood, the brain became 'fixed' in its ways and impossible to change. But Bach-y-Rita reasoned that because the nerves carrying messages from one part of the body to the brain are identical to those carrying messages from other body parts, it might actually be possible, even in adulthood, to substitute one sense for another."

I was especially intrigued by the work done with folks who have severe inner ear damage that renders them unable to tell whether they are prone or upright, leading to profound disability. "Rewiring" the sensory apparatus of the brain, using tactile regions instead of ear regions, has proven in some cases permanent, a complete cure.

The boundaries of human brain plasticity are definitely out of sight at the moment. For those of us who can manage balancing science, art, and faith simultaneously (however you define those) instead of believing them to be in conflict, the sense of hope and excitement is tremendous. It will, of course, mean giving up all the myths that race, class, gender, and sexual orientation are primarily "hard-wired" rather than manifestations of the brain's ability to adapt (even physically alter) to cultural demands placed on newborns. We'll have to accept that difference is mostly a matter of choice, and, as Stuart Smalley would say, "That's...okay."


In related news, this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that human evolution is speeding up: "People are evolving more rapidly than in the distant past, with residents of various continents becoming increasingly different from one another, researchers say.

"'Rapid population growth has been coupled with vast changes in cultures and ecology, creating new opportunities for adaptation,'" the study says. 'The past 10,000 years have seen rapid skeletal and dental evolution in human populations, as well as the appearance of many new genetic responses to diet and disease.' And they found that different changes are occurring in Africans, Asians and Europeans."

Environment over biology. And -- feed your sisters and brothers elsewhere, because our vigor as a species depends on everyone's development.

(This I Can Haz Cheezburgr image created by little gator.)

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