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January License Plate Report

January 31, 2010 - View Single Entry

The biggest haul of the year wasn't notably big. Like I keep saying, I don't get out much, and besides, it's been cold. I snagged 18 states this month. The January roll call, in order of appearance:

Massachusetts, Vermont, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Washington, Pennsylvania, Texas, New Jersey, California, Ohio, New Hampshire, Florida, Maine, Maryland, Illinois, Minnesota, and Colorado.

Sneak peak (I cannot tell a lie: I'm typing this on Groundhog Day): I saw Indiana, South Carolina, and North Carolina on February 1. Plenty of years I only spot three new states the entire month, and South Carolina is a good catch for this time of year.

Fellow Travel(l)ers

January 31, 2010 - View Single Entry

Yesterday someone on Copyediting-L brought up the term "fellow traveler." She was surprised to see it used in a clothing catalogue to mean "traveling companions," without apparent awareness of its other meaning. In the ensuing discussion it turned out that quite a few CELmates (as subscribers to Copyediting-L, aka CE-L, often call ourselves) weren't aware that "fellow traveler" also means one who sympathizes with the Communist Party, and that in the U.S. it was used by Senator Joe McCarthy and others to smear people they didn't like and destroy their reputations and/or careers. Some of these people were USians, and though they were all younger than I, they weren't that much younger.

Besides, I was three years old when Joseph Welch stood up to Senator Joe in the Army-McCarthy hearings. That is to say, I didn't see them live -- my family got its first TV in 1956, so my parents could watch the party conventions in that presidential election year -- or read about them in the newspaper. When I saw hearing footage for the first time, I was at least in high school and probably in college. Arthur Miller didn't live through the Salem witch craze either, but he still based his play The Crucible on it. The Crucible was produced on Broadway in 1953, when anti-Communist hysteria was at its height in the U.S. It was no secret that Miller was using the hysteria of 1692 to explore the hysteria of the late 1940s and early 1950s. I probably saw The Crucible for the first time before I saw footage from the Army-McCarthy hearings. By the time I did, I knew about Joe McCarthy, I knew what "fellow traveler" and "Commie sympathizer" meant, and I knew about the Salem witch trials.

I did not know about these things because I'd lived through them. I did not know about them because anyone in my family circle had been personally affected by them -- my father's contempt for McCarthy and his ilk was obvious, but he was no "red diaper baby," and neither was I.

Short version is that you don't have to have been around during the McCarthy era to know its basic vocabulary. You do have to have some curiosity about it, though, and that probably means that you sense some connection between you and it. By the time I was immersed in the antiwar movement, I identified with McCarthy's victims and knew absolutely that I was the potential target of any future witch-hunter. In my lifetime my society has tossed up other words for people of suspect loyalty, words devised to keep people in line. White sympathizers with the civil rights movement were called "nigger lovers." Feminists, and any women who dare to think for themselves, are called "dykes." And in these days of anti-terrorist hysteria, people of suspect loyalty are called "Muslims," which is to say that all Muslims are considered of suspect loyalty.

More Good News

January 29, 2010 - View Single Entry

Pretty soon I'm gonna be dropped from the Gloom N Doom Club and strong-armed into the Pollyanna Society, but here goes anyway. Trivia 10 is now up. My "And Will Rise? Notes on Lesbian Extinction" is in it. That's thrilling enough, but so is the company it's keeping: Ruthann Robson, Dolores Klaich, Cynthia Rich, Elana Dykewomon, and Margie Adam, among others. I've started reading the other contributions, and I keep having to stop because Morgana's screen gets blurry through the tears streaming down my face: these people speak my language, which I thought was dead, and know my country, which I'd begun to think was a hallucination. I've begun to bless the day my sourdough starter died.

Writers' Journal just bought "Copyediting Demystified: How to Help Your Copyeditor Make You Look Good." This is an 1,800-word article I wrote at the end of last summer and had almost forgotten. Validation is good.

I had to celebrate. In the last week, Lands' End has probably e-sent me four sale notices. Big Sale! Even Bigger Sale! 10% Off Even Bigger Sale Prices! I used to buy all my jeans from Lands' End, then Sears bought them out and I couldn't find the no-nonsense working jeans I loved. However. A few weeks ago I was in the up-island Cronig's. (Note to off-islanders: Cronig's is the upscale supermarket on Martha's Vineyard. They have two stores, both on State Road, one in Vineyard Haven, the other in West Tisbury, right next to the West Tisbury p.o., where I get my mail. I make fun of Cronig's and Cronig's shoppers all the time, but there's no denying that (a) they carry The Mud of the Place, and (b) no one else carries steel-cut oats in bulk, and that's what I eat for breakfast every morning.)

So I was in up-island Cronig's a few weeks ago, the one next to the West Tisbury post office, en route either to or from the barn and wearing my red down vest. A woman approaching me stopped dead in her tracks, her mouth open. I am not kidding. What stopped her dead in her tracks was the blackness of my down vest, which started off red. The blackness is ground-in barn dirt. Laundering doesn't make a dent in this blackness. I suppose I could wash it more often and use more toxic chemicals, but this isn't me. My filthy red vest kept me warm, so what's a little dirt? My filthy yellow Gore-tex rain slicker lasted me almost 10 years because I didn't wash it every two or three months. I believe it and that settles it.

Still, it was a little unsettling that my down vest was so dirty that it stopped approaching shoppers in their tracks, even if those shoppers were in Cronig's the upscale supermarket. This wasn't, however, enough to make me buy a new down vest, though when the second Lands' End e-flyer arrived, I did check out women's outerwear.  Hmm. There were a couple of possibilities, the prices were right, and they came in dark colors that wouldn't show dirt. I kept thinking.

Yesterday I noticed a rip in my red down best. Down was starting to leak through the hole. Hmm again.  Filth might not be enough to justify replacing the vest, but filth plus a hole that was leaking down? Filth plus a down-leaking hole plus a passionate desire for a vest that wouldn't clash with my red, burgundy, and purple sweaters? How was I going to celebrate the publication of one of the best essays I'd ever written??

Sold! I ordered a dark gray vest, two turtlenecks, and a pair of brown chinos, all for $56, free shipping.

Desert Fantasies

January 23, 2010 - View Single Entry

Here's another one from To Be Rather Than to Seem -- and one of the longer ones at that. It takes off from, and shares an epigraph with, a longer, mid-1980s essay that you can find on this website. The link's at the bottom.

* * *

A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey
into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is.
Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous;
and it will change you.

Ursula K. Le Guin
"From Elfland to Poughkeepsie"

I watched plenty of TV growing up. Most likely I watched Star Trek a few times as a teenager, but neither it nor the space operas that succeeded it made a big impression. When I read Joanna Russ's 1985 essay "Pornography by Women for Women, with Love," I was only dimly aware of Star Trek fan fiction -- fans writing and circulating stories set in the Star Trek universe and featuring Star Trek characters. "Pornography by Women" is an exuberant, entrancingly red-faced examination of a thriving subgenre of Star Trek fan fiction: "Kirk/Spock" (or "K/S") stories. K/S stories focus, in varying degrees of explicitness, on the sexual and emotional relationship between the (male) characters Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock of the starship Enterprise. The avid writers, publishers, and readers of K/S stories were virtually all women.

Was I, lesbian feminist that I was, shocked? I was not. I was shrieking and blushing in instant recognition, not because I was a closet K/S fan, but because I had been writing my own equivalent for more than twenty years. All the characters in my fantasy world were men. Until I read Russ's essay, this did not seem an, uh, appropriate topic for feminist discourse. Joanna Russ -- lesbian, feminist, and high on my list of most-admired writers -- changed all that.

I was ten or eleven when I started writing these stories down. The landscape of my early attempts was Wild Western -- no surprise there, since I was a horse-crazy kid and all my favorite TV shows were westerns: Wagon Train, Maverick, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Virginian, and The Wild, Wild West, among others. My stories starred the Flint McCullough character from Wagon Train, played by Robert Horton.Though, or maybe because, Flint was impossibly cool, I subjected him to draconian hardships. He'd be captured by bad guys and then pistol-whipped, horsewhipped, or suspended by his thumbs over a roaring fire. These grueling scenes enabled me to arrange the daring rescue of my hero and his subsequent recovery -- after which he could be captured and tortured again.

After I saw Lawrence of Arabia for the first time, in early 1963, the Wild West landscape morphed into desert. (Possibly significant aside: I passed up an opportunity to see How the West Was Won with the rest of the family in order to see Lawrence with my grandmother.) "Aurans" and "Ali" were the original stars of my fantasy -- as I recall it, my premise was that after the war Lawrence disappeared into the desert and was never seen again -- but before long they and the rest of the Lawrence cast receded into the background and vanished. My fantasy world developed its own geography and characters. The desert remained. In appearance and custom the people were vaguely Bedouin, organized into clans and tribes, living by herding, raiding, and some crop cultivation. Once every generation or so, they would fight a truly epic war, then spend the next generation dealing with the consequences. Technology was basic, horses were of primary importance, and weaponry consisted of swords and the occasional rifle.

Many a plot was driven by animosity between a father and a son, but where the sons came from wasn't clear, because women were even more absent from my fantasy world than they were from Lawrence of Arabia. Plain, noncharismatic men of ordinary ability and low rank were almost as absent as women; they did come in handy when I wanted to kill someone off. They also explained how my protagonists and antagonists managed to eat, because my main characters were almost never seen tending livestock, harvesting vegetables, or preparing meals. They were far too busy riding, fighting, and having hot sex.

My viewpoint characters were nearly always princes who had fallen on hard times. Their lineage was impeccable, but by the time the story started they were captives, hostages, slaves, and/or sole survivors of massacres in which most of their people perished. These humbled princes almost invariably become lovers and protégés of their captors or rescuers, who were always older than their lovers, often by a generation. Eventually the protégés are either restored to their birth rank, or elevated to another appropriately responsible position.

Do I still have any of these stories? Are you kidding? Page after page of hot homosex with implicit and often blatant sadomasochistic overtones, and all in my own handwriting? This was not stuff that could fall into the hands of parents, younger siblings, college roommates, or, eventually, lesbian feminist housemates. If my parents knew how warped my imagination was, surely they would trot me off to a shrink. So I hid it in places that no one ever looked, like the cardboard file cabinets where I kept all my Middle East news clippings, or I carried it around with me, and at regular intervals I destroyed it. Burning was best, but when no fireplace or incinerator was available, I'd shred it, dump it into the garbage, and carry it out to the alley on trash collection day.

Joanna Russ's "Pornography by Women, for Women, with Love" made it clear that I sure wasn't the only woman having these fantasies. "Slash fiction" -- so named for the slash in "Kirk/Spock," or "K/S" for short -- proliferated. Any male buddy duo from the small or large screen, it seemed, was fair game for female fantasies.

From the late 1970s, through the 1980s, and well into the 1990s, I was an amateur specialist in fantasy and science fiction by women. I was struck by how relatively common male-male relationships were in these stories, and how rare were sexual relationships and partnerships between women -- even in works by committed feminist writers, some of whom were lesbians. The male-male relationships were generally less erotic and much less violent than those of my desert fantasies and the clandestine world of slash fiction, but they had to be springing from the same Great Female Subconscious, didn't they? During the '90s, I participated in several science fiction convention panels with titles like "Girls on Boys on Boys" that explored the phenomenon raucously and pithily at the same time.

My own take was that my imagination had been strongly shaped by all the movies and TV shows I loved as a kid. My tastes were eclectic. I acquired the evening news habit when still in elementary school; in addition to TV westerns, I watched variety shows like Ed Sullivan, late-night talk shows like Jack Paar, and anything politically irreverent and funny, like The Smothers Brothers and, eventually, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Later, as westerns grew scarce, I turned to shows about World War II, like Rat Patrol. Sitcoms I generally avoided, though I was a big Hogan's Heroes fan. What these shows had in common, apart from the later Laugh-In, is that women were peripheral, if not totally absent.

I had no trouble whatsoever identifying with the male heroes of these TV shows, or movies either -- until women appeared on the screen. When women appeared, the interesting action stopped and it was time to go to the concession stand for popcorn or downstairs for a snack. I didn't learn the word "dissonance" till many years later, but that's what I was experiencing. Once actors of both sexes occupied the screen, my belief that sex didn't matter was shaken and I had a harder time identifying with the male protagonists. Not only were the female characters embarrassing, the male heroes usually got sappy and stupid when they showed up. It seemed only polite to avert my eyes until they came back to their senses.

Before I read Russ's slash essay, I had tried and tried to write women into my desert fantasies. Again and again I failed. My male characters spoke, acted, and got in and out of trouble with no conscious help from me. The women faded away as soon as I stopped propping them up. My fantasy world, it seemed, had its own internal logic, its own laws and dynamics, and it resisted coercion with Gandhian persistence. When a writer, asked why she made this or that choice, responds with "That's the way it happened," I understand completely. When a capable fiction writer forces a character to act in a certain way, it's often obvious to readers who are caught up in the story.

Writers aren't entirely at the mercy of their creations, however. My first attempts to create fictional characters who were larger than svelte -- fat, even -- were not successful. As soon as I let them go, they'd all shrink to socially acceptable size. I couldn't blame my fictional world for this. This world was here and now, and since I myself was considerably larger than svelte I knew bloody well that large women and fat women were as capable as small-sized ones. The limits were being imposed by my own imagination. The imagination doesn't take kindly to coercion, and fantasies resist attempts to suppress or repress them. But like a stampede, which can be turned but not stopped dead in its tracks, they can be nudged and shaped. Practice does make a difference.

As the feminist sex debates got under way around 1980, many feminists leapt to one side or the other: pro pornography or against it, pro s/m or against it. Me? Hah! I had zero interest in promoting the porn industry, but here I'd been writing my own porn for years. ("Erotica"? No way. The main reason for writing, reading, and rereading this stuff was to turn myself on.) And since the power dynamics of my fantasy world were blatantly sadomasochistic, I couldn't exactly claim to be "anti-s/m." Celebrating the practice of s/m or use of pornography wasn't on my political agenda, but as a feminist I sure was fascinated by their hold on my imagination and that of many other women.

Once I started looking for patterns in my fantasies, I saw that my imagination had created a world where it was safe to be powerless, and totally not in control. The exact opposite of the family I grew up in, where my father continually ridiculed my mother for not having the right answer and my mother continually set herself up for ridicule with claims so illogical they made me cringe. I'd kept myself safe over the years by always having the right answer, shutting up when I didn't, and becoming expert in fields my father didn't know much about. Learning new skills inevitably meant an extended period of fumbling around and looking like an idiot, so either I shied away from new things or I mastered the basics and then dropped out when I was almost ready to try my rudimentary skills among people who were already proficient. The geography of my fantasy world was alien on its surface, but I was more at home there than I was anywhere else.

In the spring of 1985 -- not long after Joanna Russ's essay appeared, and shortly before I moved to Martha's Vineyard -- I attended a workshop in Baltimore led by novelist Maureen Brady. The workshop was called "Secrets, Settings, and Characters," or something like that. In the "secrets" section, Maureen had us write at the top of a piece of paper "I could never tell anyone that . . ." and then run with it. I wrote about not being able to tell anyone in my lesbian feminist community that all of my fantasies were about men. With most of the workshop's free-writing exercises, we volunteered to read our own work. Because of the nature of this one, Maureen said she would be glad to read some of the writing herself; we could put it in a box with no name attached. I did so. Mine was one of the pieces she read aloud. Within half an hour I was claiming it as mine. By the end of the year I had written a full-blown essay about it, "What's a P.C. Feminist like You Doing in a Fantasy like This? A Few Answers and a Few Questions." It was published in the spring 1986 issue of Lesbian Contradiction.

Post-Election Blooz

January 20, 2010 - View Single Entry

Almost one year to the day after Barack Obama was inaugurated -- Martha Coakley lost.

I posted a couple of comments to the Boston Globe website. Here they are.

Going into the election, I figured that if Coakley won, we wouldn't win much, but if she lost, we would lose big-time. She lost. Not having Martha Coakley in the U.S. Senate isn't a big deal. Giving aid and encouragement to the Republicans who created the mess we're in -- that's a huge deal. I think this is a wake-up call to the Democratic Party: Stop acting like Republicans in putting the interests of big corporations before the interests of the people, the country, and the planet. The Republicans do it way better than you do. Even their sex scandals are better than yours. Start thinking and acting independently.

It's pretty pathetic that anyone could think that a vote for the Republicans is a vote "against the system," and that anything about the Obama administration is "leftist." Even a lukewarm leftist has some inkling that underregulated capitalism -- which thinks making more and more money is more important than the well-being of real people -- lies at the root of the country's problems. Maybe some Democrats get it, but the insurance industry's pawprints are all over the so-called health care "reform" package currently on the table. Get it together, Democrats. That way, when you win, the country wins too.

Another commenter wrote: "Now I know how the German people felt as they smashed down the Berlin Wall! The Revolution is on and the GOP is the new punk rock!"

Yeah? If punk rock comes out for abstinence education, I think it's sailing under a false flag. I know how the moderate, reasonably rational people in Germany felt when Hitler was elected chancellor. No, Brown isn't in that league. In a year or two, pollsters will be asking "How do you rate Senator Brown's performance?" and most voters will scratch their heads and say "Senator who?" But the "perfect storm" that an earlier poster mentioned is similar: a frustrated and scared electorate whose attention is easily diverted toward scapegoats and away from the real causes of the mess we're in. And we can't blame any Versailles Treaty for siphoning our wealth away: it's good ol' American corporations and mega-banks that have done it. It sure doesn't help that the Democratic Party is every bit as ineffectual as the moderates of Weimar.

The Democratic Party has GOT to start talking about class. For the GOP -- the party of Big Money -- to be capitalizing this way on the class fears that they've caused and exacerbated is totally absurd. It's like Henry Ford organizing for the UAW. It's a sign of how badly we've been suckered.

I've got my fingers crossed that the Republicans won't produce a leader as charismatic and ruthless as Adolf Hitler. So far we've been lucky, sort of. They haven't tossed up many who had both charisma and brains, so from Reagan to Bush II to Senator-elect Brown they've had to elect the charismatic guy and pull the strings from offstage.

Maybe in another 50 or 60 years we'll get to dance on the rubble of the walls that the Republicans built.