coffee and inkLet the whole world crumble, so long as I can read another page. And then another after that. And then a hundred more. --Michael Dirda, Readings |
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veejane took me out for Vietnamese food. I had these yummy glutinous steamed rolls with little crispy vegetable bits inside and grilled pork and scallions on top and then on the way to the car I stopped off at a Chinese bakery so I could get red bean cakes because I love them.kate_nepveu and ckd and ktempest and grahamsleight and a woman whose name I forget, and then later on oracne. (It is possible that our fond reminscences of 80s cartoons and ktempest's detailed recollection of 80s boyband lyrics have scarred Graham for life.) We stayed for Meet the Prose, where I braved the crowds to look for rushthatspeaks. Chatted for a while and then was overwhelmed by PEOPLE PEOPLE PEOPLE and left. Veejane and I were going to get alcohol, because it's a con, even if we had resorted to a con of two, and also I was excited by the prospect of cider options broader than Woodchuck or Magner's or often, sadly, just Woodchuck (oh, Massachusetts!), but we could not find an open liquor store (oh, Massachusetts).There were no words in the language of Hoad for the layers of cells or the busy, inner life of the tree, but [Heriot] could make others feel, as he felt, that each tree was not only a changing object, but a process of spirit. At that moment he could make each blade of grass live, each leaf, each root hair reveal itself as both one and many[....]
Trees so tall their tops were now lost in distance, smooth trunks brocaded with tiny luminous mosses, shed tears of gold that ran down the bark and then fell, burning harmlessly, into the perpetual twilight under their branches, while the forest retreated without visible end. The space between the tables, between the people sitting at them, grew vast beyond understanding. Each man and woman in the hall was alone with the trees. A wind composed of light and the breath of dragons beat through the company, rustling careful clothes and tangling hair, and there in the dimenss Heriot began to shine, the broad planes of cheek and forehead remaining dark, the lines from nose to mouth, the creases of his eyelids etched on the night with fine lines of fire, each hair a thread of silver lifting with reluctant grace when the wind blew. He appeared to be not so much contained by the air as embroidered on it.
Have you ever smelled this city at the beginning of spring? Dead winter circling still, it smells of eagerness and embarrassment and, most of all, longing. Garbage, buried under snowbanks for months, gradually reappears like old habits--plastic bags, pop cans--the alleyways are cluttered in a mess of bottles and old shoes and thrown-away beds. People look as if they're unraveling. They're on their last nerves. They're suddenly eager for human touch. People will walk up to perfect strangers and tell them anything.
Thrill parties every night over on Hussel Street. That tiny house, why, it's 600 square feet of percolating, Wurlitzering sin. Those girls with their young skin, tight and glamorous, their rimy lungs and scratchy voices, one cheek flush and c'mon boys and the other, so accomodating, even with lil' wrists and ankles stripped to pearly bone by sickness. They lay there on their daybed, men all standing round, fingering pocket chains and hands curled about gin bottle necks. The girls lay there on plump pillows piled high with soft fringes, twirling between delicate fingers, their lips wet with syrups, tonics, sticky with balms, their faces freshly powdered, arching up, waiting to be attended to by men, our men, the city's men. What do you do about girls like that?
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hederahelix and coniraya about it at Wiscon anyway, so I might as well write it up.bellacrow has frequent news updates.Earlier this month, when I was almost finished writing this speech, I dreamed a dream. In this dream, I was wandering about in an arcade, searching for a restroom. I really needed it, though not for the usual reason. As often happens in dreams, though I went to the place where I knew one to be, it was closed. I was desperate to find it, because I needed to get rid of the thick wad of tongues crowding my mouth. Not only because I had an appointment, but because the feel of them in my mouth was disgusting. But I couldn’t find an open restroom. So finally I grabbed a handful of napkins from an espresso cart and tried as discreetly as possible to remove the tongues and slipped them into my pocket for later retrieval (since obviously I’d want them back again). I then looked around, trying to discover if anyone had seen me, when I realized I still had too many tongues in my mouth. I hated to be doing this in public; it felt indecent. But I couldn’t locate the restroom, and the tongues really had to come out. So again I held a sheaf of napkins to my mouth and pulled out the excess tongues, and put them in my other pocket. And so it went, until finally I woke up.
onceupon} elle, It Does Matter:. Keyshia's sister, Neffie, was speaking to a group of black girls who were pregnant and possibly had high risk exposure to STDs. Neffie shared the story of her own repeated sexual abuse and assault that had begun when she was nine, then encouraged the girls to value their bodies and their sexuality.
One of the girls asked, "What do a female supposed to think, if they've already been touched by eight different people, so it don't matter if I have sex?"
That question, for me, embodied a number of issues, primarily the fetishization of virginity and the horrible silence surrounding the sexual assault of black women.
That girl, 18 and pregnant, believed that because she had "been touched," she no longer had the autonomy, the right to say no. Her "value" was significantly lessened because she was not "innocent."
maevele, so I'm finally reading the comments hereright now I feel like I have too many stories and they are not the right ones.
Me this body this skin a CONSTANT reminder of colonialist rape , people like me only come up when it's in relation to THEIR experiences at social events .
asim, Take Back the FutureWhen you're a black kid growing up in The American South, there's not a lot of mechanisms for talking about these things. My Mother would have flipped, my Dad...wasn't listening, and my Scoutmaster would have told my Mother. My friends...well, let's not go there.
And I didn't need any of that, or so I thought (and think to this day). I just needed someone to listen to me say how fuckin' scary that was.
cereta, On rape and men (Oh yes, I'm going there)rachelmanija, I genuinely like a whole lot of heterosexual men. But I do not believe that just because I like a man, he has the same ideas about rape that I do. In fact, the conversations I've had with straight men about rape and sexual harassment have been almost universally depressing.nestra, One of the things I've been seeing in the comments to [info]cereta's post about rape is a reiteration of "I don't know anyone who's been raped" or "I don't know anyone who would abuse a woman" or "I don't know anyone who makes those kind of jokes."giandujakiss, I just keep coming back to this posttheferrett's post. I went blind with rage. I never figured out how to say what I wanted to say as angry as it needed to be, without making it seem like a threat to his daughter: It could be distant to him, because it wouldn't happen to him, because he doesn't see it as happening to her, because he doesn't see it as happening to his wife or his mother or the women he knows. But it does. It has, it will, it does. The boys and men who call "compliments," who touch you, who look at you, who discount you, who see BREASTS and that's all. And you know what? If you're a [cis-gendered] man, you'll never know about it. Your daughter will not tell you about the guys who call her on the street, the boys who throw pebbles at her on the way to the schoolbus, the guy in her class who calls out for her in school and follows her everywhere and breathes on her neck, the guy who looks like he's exposing himself and then follows her for twelve blocks when she runs away until she can duck into a grocery store to lose him, the kids five fucking years younger than her who briefly surround her on the street in broad daylight and grab her breast and laugh and are gone before she can do anything but be afraid. Later on, she will not tell you about the many and varied cases of workplace sexual harassment. cereta of hating men, which I think is pretty funny, all told, because she actually has enough faith in men to ask them to act. Me, I don't always have that faith in men. I usually have it in women. This is why I was infuriated by the comments of some audience members at the Safe(r) Space Panel at Wiscon, whose response to discussion of the OSBP was "I was on the Penguincon Concom, and it didn't spread," or "I was involved, it wasn't like that, it wasn't that bad." (This is the same response I keep seeing in white fans to people of color who say they've been harassed at cons or who say that they feel unsafe to speak honestly about racism in sf fandom.) It doesn't matter if it wasn't that bad for you, in your position of social privilege or contextual power. It doesn't matter if you feel safe in that situation. That doesn't make it okay for you to assume that everyone should share your feeling of safety, or to discount or marginalize the statements of others who did not.