By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (R–Minn.) might not be able to sustain her Tea Party-fueled lead among the perfidy of presidential wannabes, but while she remains in the race, admit it: She makes for good entertainment — in a morbidly fascinating sort of way.
Newsweek magazine’s blatantly sexist cover image of Bachmann, declaring her the “Queen of Rage,” actually elicited a complaint from National Organization for Women (NOW). Yowza, what a coupling! If Bachmann’s campaign lasts, NOW will surely do all it can to otherwise denounce her for her homophobia, anti-women’s and civil rights positions, and bent toward theocracy. But in the meantime, fun, fun, fun!
And the media’s promotion of a catfight, persistently pitting Bachmann against former Alaska governor, 2008 republican vice presidential candidate and Saturday Night Live feeder Sarah Palin — as though they are running a race distinct from the males — is annoyingly inevitable in a culture in which female candidates for our highest offices remain extraordinary and, hence, subject to gendered ridicule by the entrenched patriarchy.
But Palin’s undeclared candidacy seems ever-less a consideration for Bachmann: She barely pulled a whopping 2,000 Palinistas to her nationally-ballyhooed I’m-not-declaring-until-I’m-sure-I-can-win rally speech in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday.
Bachmann at least had the ovaries to declare, but there’s a lot more than brass ovaries to her morbid fascination. The New Yorker’s recent profile, “Leap of Faith,” by Ryan Lizza, did a tidy job of enumerating the oddly extreme influences that have contributed to the Bachmann ideology. One book in particular from Bachmann’s recommended reading list proved even more enlightening than Lizza indicated: Call of Duty, The Sterling Nobility of Robert E. Lee, by J. Steven Wilkins. Wilkins is an evangelical pastor of a breakaway Presbyterian church with passions for maximal fundamentalism and sugarcoated slavery.
Click image to enlarge.
Remember the brouhaha that arose from the August 11 candidate debate in Iowa? The crowd booed when a columnist asked Bachmann if, as president, she would submit to her husband, as she has said, prior to running for president, that she does. The uproar was curious, given her overt declarations of bibliocity (let’s go ahead and make that a word), yet she deflected the question. But Call of Duty — #3 on her State Senate must-read list — suggests that Bachmann’s two-step had a disingenuous spin.
Wilkins’s dedication of the book to his six children reads as follows:
To Matt, Jeremy, Bray, Jordan and Caleb,
with the earnest prayer that they might be true gentlemen
and to Charity,
that she might love, honor and obey such a man.
Poor Sweet Charity!
Wilkins goes on to write that “nothing excels the value of a ‘woman who fears the Lord’ (Proverbs 19:14).”
Yep, real Christian men prefer their womenfolk scared. An entertaining juxtaposition with the frequent suggestions that Bachmann herself is kind of scary.
Wilkins concludes his chapter on the godly wife with, “A good wife is truly the most valuable asset any man can have. ‘Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord’ (Proverbs 18:22).”
Please note that the emphasis on “thing” is Wilkins’. Although suggestive of his objectification of women, you have to wonder if Bachmann has internalized that classic rite of marital tyranny, if she actually thinks of herself as a “thing,” subjecting herself to her slightly loony husband’s questionable will — again, something she previously indicated to a Christian audience that she does. Of course, she might have been pandering to the poor women whose oppression she was promoting, but then that wouldn’t be godly, would it.
It would, however, be interesting to know if Bachmann takes Wilkins as literally as she says she takes the Bible.
Wilkins relates how Lee’s wife, Mary, expressed “great distress” at the lack of seats for slaves at worship services, discouraging their attendance. Did Mary then request that chairs be brought to the room or some extra pews be installed or at least a few hay bales be strategically placed? Nope: “As a result, Mary doubled her efforts in the spiritual instruction of her maid Cassy.”
Although Wilkins touts Mary’s response as indication of her humility, grace and caring heart, it’s actually a bit of a non sequitur, although that’s plenty common in politics. Could we then count on President Bachmann to respond to, say, another hurricane spiraling up the eastern seaboard with a declaration of spiritual disaster in that hotbed of heathenism, San Francisco?
To be fair to Mary, her reaction was in keeping with her era — according to Wilkins and presumably Bachmann. Wilkins, citing revisionist texts as ludicrous as his own (e.g. Time on the Cross, by Fogel and Engerman), writes that “the average slave in the South had a higher standard of living than the average poor white in the region.” He quotes Lee as writing that slavery was “a greater evil to the white than to the black race” and “blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially, and physically.” Lee reportedly believed that emancipation required a gradual process over time “for the sanctifying effects of Christianity to work in the black race and fit its people for freedom.”
The clincher from Wilkins and presumably Bachmann: “The two races whose lives were intertwined in the old South were more intimate and dependent upon each other than any two races in any country in the world. This mutual dependence produced an intimacy and trust between white and black races that has seldom if ever existed anywhere in history.” Including the South, you nincompoops! “… In fact, it bred on the whole, not contempt but, over time, mutual respect. This produced a mutual esteem of the sort that always results when men give themselves to a common cause.”
That is actually much more disturbing than entertaining. But if you share a common cause for following Bachmann’s nincompoopery, subscribe to Dump Bachmann, a blog that has covered her since 2004, when she was a Minnesota state senator having ousted the 28-year republican incumbent Gary Laidig with a run Bachmann said was not planned. This miraculous faux pas earned Laidig’s recent wrathful description of Bachmann as a “girl scout with a switchblade knife.”
Wonder why NOW didn’t go after that one. …
Love,
K-B
Crossposted at the Ocean Beach Rag and San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.
Presented by Fallbrook’s Writers Read, Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Café des Artistes
103 S. Main Street, Fallbrook, CA
5:30 Doors open, supper menu available
6:00 Open mic
6:30 Tom McNeal reading, Q&A and book signing
Tom McNeal, a San Diego County-based author, set his first adult novel Goodnight, Nebraska, in the town where he spent summers as a child. Then, with his wife Laura McNeal, he wrote four acclaimed young adult novels: Crooked, Zipped, Crushed and The Decoding of Lana Morris.
To Be Sung Underwater, a love story unlike any other, was released in June, and it was swiftly recognized by authors, readers and the publishing industry as an important work by a gifted writer. Markus Zusak, author of The Book Thief, wrote of the novel, “You don’t so much read To Be Sung Underwater as you’re consumed by it. The characters are unforgettable. The writing is staggering. More importantly, though, it’s the courage of this book that sets it apart. It’s the bravest, most beautiful book I’ve read in a long time.”
McNeal has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and his short stories have been widely anthologized.
Join us for Tom’s reading, Q&A with the audience, and book signing. To Be Sung Underwater will be available for purchase at the reading.
If you would like to dine, please call the Café for reservations, 760-728-3350.
For more reading information, contact Kit-Bacon at kbgressitt@gmail.com or 760-522-1064.
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
Kiersten White, a Carlsbad-based author, has done the seemingly impossible: She has created a young adult fantasy-romance series to rival Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight — minus the dogma and with a little more appreciation for her female protagonist’s capabilities.
In White’s series, launched in 2010 with Paranormalcy and continued in July with Supernaturally, 16-year-old Evie works for a covert paranormal containment agency, subduing and tagging the multitude of supernatural beasties that walk the earth, unbeknownst to most vulnerable humans. Evie’s weapon of choice, a Taser, is, of course, sooo age appropriate: pink and bejeweled with rhinestones.
Paranormalcy jumped to the best-seller list and introduced a new generation of seventh grade-and-up readers into yet another fantasy mythology, with White’s particular twist. She redefines the rules for vampires, werewolves and faeries, along with gremlins, trolls, sylphs and sundry other creatures that range from disgusting to brutal to enthralling. Many readers will be grateful for White’s myth-busting of the Twilight vampires’ impeccable beauty and attraction: The lovely vampire faces in White’s novels are nothing but glamour — that bit of magic that looks good to everyone but Evie, who has a gift for seeing through their allure to their rotting inner corpses. Not unlike the groups of perfectly coiffed, clad and accoutered teens who, although envied by many, deep down inside are so totally superficial.
And, speaking of allure, part of the Paranormalcy series’ appeal to teen audiences might be the abundance of sexual references, particularly in the first book. There were more than a dozen such mentions in chapter 1, which is all of eight pages.
White tones it down a bit in Supernaturally — until the discussion of Evie’s boyfriend’s tongue and its prospects, which, if word of it gets around, might just put off parents from considering the series for their young daughter’s birthday gifts. But many parents and readers will find White’s approach provides a reasonable contrast to the Twilight series’ abstinence-only message.
Sex aside (perhaps a ridiculous suggestion for the series’ target audience), in the second book, Evie is ever more funny and flippant, while confronting a new and mysterious opponent, which makes for entertaining storytelling. She deftly and brashly narrates her efforts to be a normal teenager, experiencing the annoying realities of attending a normal human high school, while snagging and tagging absolutely abnormal critters. As Evie’s exploits reveal more of her past and threaten her relationship with her boyfriend, Lend, the book takes on both an increasingly complex mythology and an increasingly teen-romance tone. Evie’s persistence in defining herself in relation to her boyfriend, or even to the faery who threatens her, is disappointing. Still, Edie shows some quality inner turmoil as she struggles with White’s creation of a decidedly classist culture, however covert, in which supernatural folks are second class citizens, subjected to electronic leashes, a history of forced sterilization, and any number of other violations of their civil and not-so-human rights.
The counter-culture community in which Edie and Lend live in Supernaturally serves as a nice foil to the repressive covert agency’s attempt to contain all things non-human, rather than to allow them to self-regulate. And this certainly challenges Evie’s perception of her role as a tagger. But her position on the treatment of the creatures varies through the book as she battles aspects of her own special character, the teen angst of first love and the magical forces that would undo the normalcy she so desperately desires.
For readers hooked on Paranormalcy, the revelations and conclusion of Supernaturally will surely make them eager for book three, Endlessly, due out in 2012.
In the meantime, could the messages to young female readers be a bit healthier? Sure. Will teen fantasy fans love the series? OMG, totally.
Author website: www.kierstenwhite.com
Crossposted at the North County Times.
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
Friday, August 26, was Women’s Equality Day. Sadly, it’s a bit of a misnomer. Besides, how many people actually know what it is that the day celebrates? It surely is not equality. Women don’t have equality. Even I don’t have equality, and I am no pantywaist — but the same rights, responsibilities and opportunities as men? Oh my goodness, no. Women, as a class, have not yet achieved any of that.
What we have is the right to be oppressed by ludicrous expectations for our gender, including that ever popular slut-mommy routine straight men are taught to favor; by mass media representations that tell the world what is most valuable about women are our breasts and penetrable orifices; and by the often unspoken yet screeching mantra to suck it all up for family, god and country.
As for responsibilities, women are burdened with an embarrassment of riches. While we have the responsibility of providing one of the pro forma two household incomes that keep everyone in the latest cell phones (if we’re not toting that bale as a single parent), the onus remains on us for the vast majority of household work and child rearing — along with maintaining extended family and friend 
networks, managing household finances, negotiating service provider contracts, and distributing the intangible benefits of our core competencies. It’s akin to leading a business, except only 28 of the Fortune 1000 corporations have female CEOs. That they are paid 8 to 25 percent less than their male counterparts should not be considered commentary on their job performances, but, rather, a reflection of their body parts.
And then, there is the cornucopia of opportunities that are showered upon women like sweet manna from heaven. Actually, I’d say they’re more like the ammonia swirling from a unkempt pissoir. Among many, there is the opportunity to be denigrated for our emotions, our bodily functions, our weight, our femininity and our lack thereof; the opportunity to be sidelined with the label “bitch” for characteristics that earn men promotions; the opportunity to fend off unwanted sexual advances by those who interpret the length of our skirts or size of our boosiasms as an invitation to pounce; and the opportunity to earn an average of 80¢ to each dollar a man earns — whether he’s average or a numskull.
So, what’s a woman to do? I suppose it helps to point out such peccadilloes, but I’ve been writing about them for way too many moons. Last year, it was the Woman’s Day advertising campaign that touted vagina deodorizing as a career advancement tactic. In 2009, it was the fear of feminism that inhabits conservative male rhetoric and inhibits progress toward equality. Before that, it was the shunning of the term “feminist” and on and on.
Just how long does it take for folks to recognize the inequity of inequality?
It’s been one full lifetime since the impetus for Women’s Equality Day. Still wondering what makes the date so special? It’s the day in 1920 that women in the United States were finally allowed — allowed! — to vote. It took a constitutional amendment, and what actually changed? Well, in 1919, Great Aunt Cappie was studying to be a surgeon, learning to cut folks open from stem to stern and work medical magic with their innards. But she couldn’t vote: She wasn’t deemed to have the temperament for such decisions. Then in 1920, her mental and emotional capabilities, formerly belittled by men who feared women’s suffrage, suddenly received a constitutional upgrade.
In fact, Aunt Cappie didn’t change; it was an attitude adjustment and the presumption that women’s votes could be added to their husbands’, a presumption that lingers in some backwater bedrooms to this day.
But for the rest of us, what has women’s suffrage produced? Of late, it’s the likes of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, who think deriding their political opponents just like the boys if not more so, opposing women’s and civil rights, and winking — or belatedly blinking — their mascaraed lashes make them prime female presidential fodder.
If only they respected themselves a bit more, but apparently one lifetime has not been enough. And I’m not sure which is the greater hindrance to equality: men who fear us or women who play us.
Love,
K-B
Crossposted at the Ocean Beach Rag and San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.
Pissoir image from affordablehousing.org.
By Kristin Laurel
Who shall set a law to lovers? Love is a greater law into itself.
– Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, A.D. 524
Like October poplars that are first
to drop their leaves, I often find myself unprotected, exposed.
The one I love is more reserved,
like the Bur Oak that clings
to its leaves, perhaps there is a gentle sacredness
in not giving everything away.
We hold hands on the narrow path
while squirrels scuttle to bury
their hoarded treasure.
I read once, that they find only ten percent of the nuts
they hide; the rest go to seed and give rise
to trees. I stop to pick up
an acorn, press it between my thumb and forefinger.
It smells of musky earth, a trace of permanence.
Two joggers approach—
we quickly drop hands.
A few red maples glare, against a pale-blue sky.
And I am ashamed.
It’s the same when I cut a hug—
short, hide my tears
when I greet her at the airport,
or cover up our held hands with the bucket
of popcorn at the theatre.
We look around again.
No people. It’s safe.
My God, it is strange
how perfectly our clasped hands fit,
how this is the closest thing to God’s love I’ve known,
how other’s see this as wrong.
Sometimes, it feels like I was abducted
from the nice white straight world
and came back queer-colored and green.
She says, “In public turn up the friendship and turn down the love,”
but I say, “Why should we contain love?”
She treads lightly, doesn’t disrupt the forest floor.
I drag my feet and kick up leaves,
tearing them like tissue paper.
I let my shoes sling mud—
This morning, on Good Morning America,
they showed members of Westboro Baptist Church,
picketing at a dead vet’s funeral, holding their signs:
Thank God For Dead Soldiers
God Hates Fags
Jews Killed Jesus
Listen. I’m not here to preach.
I’ve been no saint.
I remember how, in college, I shared an apartment with Tammy
whose father was a pastor; how distraught, she confided in me:
“I want to get married, go to church and have kids,” she said,
“But I’m attracted to women.”
I moved out as fast as I could.
And I remember how once, in 5th grade,
at Hesperia Christian, I called a kid a faggot.
Even though I didn’t know what the word meant,
Mrs. Thompson made me put my hands
on the wall and spanked my ass
with a holy paddle.
I have a few friends still “praying for my soul.”
And let them pray; I need all the help I can get.
My godmother is coming around
but I haven’t spoken to my father since I fell in love;
he drinks too much, and calls me a dyke.
Yet, I’ve had it easy.
I wasn’t court-martialed by the US military.
I wasn’t put on the stand to defend
my career and myself as a human being
for associating with gays like my friend Maria was, a decade ago.
I wasn’t disowned by my Christian family, like Donnie,
my mom’s cousin, who died alone of AIDS, back in the 80s.
Yes, I have a lot to be thankful for.
The people I now call family
support me and the one I love.
And yes, I’ve been in love with a man, and a woman,
so in case you are curious, let me tell you, love is love.
Sex is sex.
“But,” people ask, “what about the kids?”
Children have a way of seeing things
for what they are. I hold my daughter’s hand
sometimes when we’re watching TV. I hold my youngest
son’s hand, my mother’s, my sister’s, my grandpa’s—
my oldest son won’t let me hold his, but he’s nearly sixteen.
My kids love me, and they love my partner.
And yet I know what my mother fears. It has nothing
to do with what goes on
in my home. Maybe we all need to shut off the news,
and get close to a person with a label
we have nothing in common with.
Are we really a nation divided?
Don’t most of us all care about the same things at the core,
our kids, our spouses, our aging parents?
Maybe we all need to just take a walk in the woods.
In the safety of the car we head home, holding hands.
Tomorrow, she will leave, and we will be separated by
Minnesota prairie and North Carolina mountaintops.
I still have my little acorn. I twirl it around in my other hand.
It is face-less, and race-less; an oval shaped head, wearing a hat,
enclosing a single seed.
As a child, I wanted to plant an acorn,
but I was told, “You’ll be dead before it ever grows up to be anything.”
I’m going to give it to her before she goes,
have her plant it in some fresh, red clayed, Appalachian soil.
Editor’s note: Kristin Laurel is a divorced mother of three teenagers, employed as a nurse, who unexpectedly fell in love with a woman three years ago. She graduated this January from a poetry apprenticeship at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, and has recently been published in Calyx, Main Street Rag, Hospital drive, Talking Stick, Prose Poem Project, Grey Sparrow Review and other journals. “God Hates Fags” is from her first collection of poetry, Giving Them all Away.
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
We were on a quest for the perfect loveseat, my daughter and I. Clean enough that you don’t mind touching skin to upholstery and just enough wear so a little spilled tea won’t break your heart. Kate and I were clear on our priorities, and, as luck would have it — or was it something more intentional? — we found a treasure at our favorite Fallbrook thrift store, a nice church-sponsored place that seeks charity and justice, values we share. Well, minus the dogma. And the 
misogyny. We’re also passionately opposed to that celibacy thing.
Nonetheless, our quest was fulfilled — until we stumbled into one of those moments that stay with you a lifetime, a moment that surely is meant to instruct, but still we struggle to define the lesson.
“You have to write about it,” Kate said.
But how do I write about something that made my daughter weep? Oh, a part of me wants to, but is it the right part, the part that hopes to leave the path we travel a little sweeter smelling than we find it or the part that is not yet ready to let go the stinky rage at injustice?
When we first moved to Fallbrook the Friendly Village, Kate and I would cheer every time we passed a Black person in town — our little two fan wave, tempered by seatbelts but with unfettered enthusiasm for a more diverse team — it was that rare. And Fallbrook was that hostile to the occasional African-American military family who blundered into town and to the Latino laborers who kept the place running, while white folk spouted such grocery line chatter as, “Well, you know I’m not a racist, but…” And that’s just it: That was 20-some years ago, and we like to think Fallbrook has become more enlightened.
Yes, that’s what we like to think, and maybe it has. But, as we approached the thrift store counter to purchase our treasure of a loveseat, we stumbled on a throwback, a troglodyte freshly unearthed from his subterranean anachronism of bigotry and igno—
Oops. That would be the enraged part of me. Let me try that again.
As we stood in line to buy the loveseat, the white, middle-aged gentleman behind the counter, whose mission is “to grow spiritually by offering person-to-person service to those who are needy and suffering,” was telling the Spanish-speaking woman before him that what she had was a blouse and a sweater, not two blouses. The woman’s daughters explained that both items were on the blouse rack.
“I don’t care where you found it,” the white, middle-aged gentleman said in a voice with slightly elevated volume — say, on a scale of 1 to 10, 5 being conversation level, he was at a 6. “This one’s a sweater, not a blouse,” and he poked at the thing I’d have called neither a blouse nor a sweater, but, rather, a shirt. But I live in sweats and blue jeans, so what do I know. Not much, except that the white, middle-aged gentleman then picked up the subject garment, waved it in front of the woman and said, “Suéter, not blusa. See?” and the woman’s shoulders turned inward as her head bowed. “Sué–ter!” he said at about volume 7.
I looked into my dear one’s eyes and said, “I’m sorry, Sweetie, but I cannot buy anything here,” and she agreed as we turned to go.
But then the white, middle-aged gentleman thrust the thing into the woman’s face, repeating, “Sué–ter! Sué–ter! Sué–ter!”
She shrank with each thrust of the shirt, farther into that place of oppression women know so well, particularly women of color. Oh, she had tried — and her daughters had tried — to gently disagree with the white, middle-aged gentleman, but this is what their efforts had wrought: the verbal assault of a privileged white male belittling those he would serve as they attempted a trivial purchase gone utterly wrong — and growing more intensely so. So utterly wrong and so increasingly intense, that I could not be still.
“Excuse me,” I said to the white, middle-aged gentleman, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but you are behaving so dishonorably.”
“To who?” he asked as though he didn’t know but delivered at maybe a 7.5, which suggested he did.
Kate, my dear one, responded with, “To humanity.”
I would have taken a moment to savor the blended pride and sorrow, but for the ensuing assault now aimed at us, the clincher being, “Who are you?” spewed at about volume 8. “You’re not my priest!”
“No, but you need one,” I retorted, devoid of charity. “This is a Christian business. If there is a god, god is love. But you are serving hate,” which sent him into another tirade and escorted Kate and me right out the door.
We found our way to the car. Kate wept at the grotesquery of prejudice and privilege. I sat stunned by the man’s wrath and my idiocy. When the woman and her daughters emerged from the store, I apologized for further embarrassing them. The woman let me hug her, and her daughters said they are treated like that pretty regularly in Fallbrook the Friendly Village.
We parted ways, and I wondered if I had done the right thing, while Kate wondered at humankind: “I don’t care what people think and feel about certain races, sexual orientations, political alignments — but be human to your fellow humans!”
Now, we continue our quest for the perfect loveseat. We hope our paths cross charity and justice. And we remain uncertain what lesson is to be learned from our moment with the white, middle-aged gentleman who is so certain of the difference between a blusa and a suéter.
Love,
K-B
Crossposted at the Ocean Beach Rag, The Progressive Post and San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.
Thrift store image by Vista Vision via a Creative Commons license.
The adage for academics, that you have to publish to succeed, continues to haunt professors into the 21st century, particularly those who would prefer to grade first year physics students’ papers on the applications of impulse-momentum theorem than to put pen to paper or hand to keyboard. But Professor Marc André Meyers has followed a path to publishing that manages to blend his expertise in explosives with his love of the creative written word: Meyers writes novels and poetry.
That is not to suggest that the University of California San Diego Distinguished Professor of Materials Science has not also written weighty academic papers on such esoterica as nanocrystalline materials, but, as Meyers said in a recent interview, “I was going to write a novel, hell or high water.” And that is just what he has done — two of them: Mayan Mars, published in 2005, and Chechnya Jihad, in 2010. He has also published a collection of poetry begun during his childhood in Brazil, Abscission/Implosion.
“I struggled,” Meyers said. “I learned the craft. I’m still learning the craft. I used my experience as a professor, with the environment, and my travels, and science … but [the novels] are not science fiction; they could be maybe science fiction thriller.”
Regardless of the genre in which Meyers’ novels might be categorized — his ability to conceptualize at the nano-level could produce countless subgenre options — Meyers’ writing is both a challenge and a joy for him.
“My background in engineering is not the best for writing,” he explained. “You have doctors write and lawyers write, but very few engineers write. And I see how my colleagues struggle to write. They huff and they puff. But for me, it is easier. It’s a burden and an honor.”
It might also be a reflection of the chaos Meyers experienced, living under a brutal military junta in Brazil, where oppression and intrigue were the norm. The son of immigrants from Luxembourg, Meyers lived a fairly privileged life until college. “It was a dangerous time, and I had written a couple poems making fun of the military,” Meyers recalled. “If they think you have connections to terrorist organizations, they would beat you up to get names of other people. Then they go after those names, and then those names. I was scared and I got the hell out of Brazil as soon as I could, and I came to the United States.”
Meyers’ exposure to oppression is present in the themes he has addressed in his novels, the plights of the Chechnyans and indigenous peoples of South America. “I am with the underdog, because of the soul,” Meyers said. “My parents are from a small country, Luxembourg, that has been stepped on by many others. Then I come from a small town in Brazil. I developed appreciation for this type of people — the simple people. The Brazilians have a way to look down on the lower classes, that I never really appreciated too much.”
A natural storyteller, Meyers then launched into a tale.
“I feel for the Indians because I saw the plight of the Indians in the Amazon. … I traveled to Bolivia once, when I was 18 years of age, just when they struck Che Guevara. I was on a bus. It was very crowded, and there was this gentleman who stood up and he said, ‘Ah you’re from Brazil!’ He went over to one of the Indians, and he said, ‘Get up to give a place to the señor.’ I said, ‘No, no.’ But the man took the wife and slapped her right in the face. ‘You, Indian, get up and let our señor sit.’ I was a coward; I didn’t know what to do. But I saw how these people were treated by the descendents of the Spaniards.”
The compassion born of such experiences is one of many ingredients in Meyers’ novels, and through his writing he has learned it is never too late to right a wrong. As he described in an autobiographical piece, “By writing I can penetrate into unknown worlds, redress wrongs, create beauty and justice, free of the impediments of action and the difficulties and strictures of science. It is a magical wand through which I can transform reality by recreating it. And thus I march on, toward the end of my days, a lady on each arm. On my left, Musa, fun, fickle, and flirtatious. On the right, Scienta, solid, serious, and strong.”
………….
Author’s website: marcmeyers.org
2011 San Diego Poetry Annual Launch Reading
August 10, 2011
Café des Artistes
103 S. Main Street, Fallbrook, CA
5:30 Doors open, supper menu available
6:00 The Poets of the 2011 San Diego Poetry Annual, followed by open mic
Now in its fifth year of publication, the 2010-2011 San Diego Poetry Annual features the work of English and Spanish language poets from throughout San Diego County, including 235 poems by 154 poets, including featured poet Steve Kowit and Marge Piercy.
Published by author Bill Harding, the 2010-2011 Annual was edited by Brandon Cesmat, Olga Garcia, Edith Jonsson-Devillers, Seretta Martin, Robt O’Sullivan Schleith, Terrence Spohn, Megan Webster and Jon Wesick.
The Annual is now part of the permanent collections of every college and university library in San Diego County, the San Diego City and County library systems, and the libraries of independent cities from Oceanside to Chula Vista, El Cajon to Escondido.
Copies of the Annual will be available for sale and signing by the poets reading on the 10th. Come celebrate the region’s talent with us!
For more information, contact Kit-Bacon at kbgressitt@gmail.com or 760-522-1064.
For all the tumult and angst between mothers and daughters, it’s a wonder they survive each other at all, much less, come to know each other. Or so it seems, until one is reminded of the inextricable tendrils that weave mothers and daughters into inseparable tales. San Diego-based author Margaret Dilloway provides such a reminder in How to Be an American Housewife, first published in hardcover in 2010 and released this month in paperback.
Dilloway will be discussing and signing the novel at Warwick’s in La Jolla, Tuesday, August 9, at 7:30 p.m.
Dilloway’s book crafts a lovely, yearning story of a Japanese mother, Shoko, and her very American daughter, Sue. The story examines the universal yet somehow always unique mother-daughter relationship in the context of war and its lingering effects, prejudice in all its insidiousness, and redemption, found in unexpected and subtle ways.
In a recent interview, Dilloway said of mothers and daughters, “I’ve heard from a lot of readers, they never thought about ‘who’ their mothers were before they were mothers. And there’s so much angst attached to mother-daughter relations. I was reading a book by a linguist about the competition between them, the meta-messages. The mother says something innocuous, but the daughter hears something else. It’s a very challenging relationship. That’s why I think it’s important to read books that help make sense of it.”
And make sense, she does — a necessary task of both author and daughter, for Dilloway readily admits her relationship with her mother was not ideal, and it remained unresolved when her mother died. “I don’t know if I would have written the same book if she’d been alive. … My mother and I never really got along. She died when I was 20, so we never got to the stage that we got to be friends.”
Nonetheless, Dilloway has found some peace in the writing, which for her “was cathartic,” and in the process she deals with the damage wrought by prejudice and the quest for redemption that seem to perpetually challenge humankind.
“In Hawaii, where we lived for a couple years, there’s a lot of different cultures all mixed up together, and for the most part everyone gets along together. … In California, there are a lot of Mexican immigrants, but people try to keep them separate, and I wonder if they’ll ever blend. I wonder if people are afraid of losing their own heritage. … My mother did say one reason she wanted to settle in San Diego was because she thought there was more of a mixture here than in other cities, where she felt stared at.”
Interestingly, Dilloway’s book is a bit of a target for prejudice. “I got a note from a Morman — there’s a Morman in the book — and it said I was totally wrong about Mormans, and a Morman person would never marry a Japanese. Well, my father would find that interesting, because my father is a Morman and he married a Japanese woman.”
As for redemption, Dilloway generously grants it to her characters in various forms.
“It was a novel of redemption on several different levels,” she explained. “A lot of things in the book deal with Japanese-U.S. relations. In some ways it was dealing with the ghosts of World War II and prejudice. … Then there’s the prejudice [Shoko] experiences when she comes to the U.S. It’s redeeming in how these things are resolved. And then the mother-daughter relationship, the mother and daughter in the book didn’t have a good relationship when the daughter was growing up. It’s a book of redemption also for their relationship.”
A successful book might be considered a form of redemption for an author, who toils at the expense of family and friends. If so, Dilloway has found hers in How to Be an American Housewife, and she has just finished her second novel. “It’s called Queen of Show,” she said, “and it’s about an amateur rose breeder, very close to perfecting a new line of roses, when her wayward niece comes to live with her and throws her life in a tizzy.” Wayward nieces and aunts sound as though they’d be right up Dilloway’s alley.
Learn more about How to Be an American Housewife and Margaret Dilloway.
Crossposted at the North County Times.
July 31st, 2011 in
Uncategorized
By Kit-Bacon Gressitt
When I last worked a corporate job, I wished for a wife.
Now, as I study the shifting distribution of labor between females and males, I feel a little guilty about that. And as I find I have the time to offer to take the week’s suits to the dry cleaners, I’m no longer concerned about gender implications. And as I see the burgeoning acceptance of same-sex marriage and the trend from women referring to their “wives” to women referring to their wives, I wonder how the definitions and demarcations of women’s work and men’s work might change in the next few generations.
1955 guide to the good wife…
… not what I had in mind, but interesting
Back then, though, I really wanted a wife.
Oh, I had a perfectly good husband. He would welcome me at the door with a smartly shaken martini as I dragged myself in when most folks were contentedly farting in front of prime time TV, trot me back out to the car to take me to dinner, and offer up a quick boink before we crashed for the night.
While that was quite lovely — and loving — what he didn’t know was, well, there was a whole lot he didn’t know. Because I didn’t tell him.
I didn’t tell him that I would have loved to crawl into the womb of my home with a bowl of pasta and a foot rub.
I didn’t tell him that I would then have noticed the fur balls and felt compelled to gather them up before settling back into the loveseat and pasta.
I didn’t tell him that his inevitable suggestion that I leave the fur balls for the housekeeper would have angered and then saddened me.
I didn’t tell him that scooping them up himself was an option.
I didn’t tell him that dining out and housekeepers and smartly shaken martinis helped perpetuate a job I hated; a job that built a pool and remodeled a kitchen and took us around the world and paid for the college fund and rescued family members and kept us in the style to which we had happily become accustomed; a job that sucked big, hairy elephant schlongs.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t tell him I hated the job quite that much.
I hated it, because I spent 10 or 12 hours a day with a tribe of white, middle-aged men, in a culture in which the thought that Hurricane Katrina did a much-needed cleansing of New Orleans was actually uttered — and got a laugh. A culture in which the suggestion that a particular employee would not be able to do her public relations job if she gained any more weight, was met with concurring nods and silence. A culture where forwarding twat jokes at executive team meetings, from one Blackberry to another, was SOP, while Christian computer screensavers and the CEO’s scripture-of-the-day emails fronted for their sins.
No, I didn’t tell him quite how much I hated it. How I hated the sight of the boardroom table and reclining upholstered chairs. How I hated the smell of the place. How I hated the tribe’s privileged touch as they thumbed through reports, most often prepared for them by absent women. How I hated the lot of them, and how I began to hate my husband, simply because he was one of them, a white, middle-aged male. Nope, I didn’t tell him that.
And I didn’t tell him that I hated myself even more, for working in such a belittling, patriarchal, misogynistic environment.
And then I left.
And then I didn’t hate anyone anymore.
And then I began to forget why I wanted a wife when I had a perfectly good husband.
Except … although I’m ashamed to admit it, on occasion I still wish for a wife, the comforts of the feminine giver of care, a consoling bosom in which to bury my troubled brow, the smell of baking shortbread I didn’t knead myself, a void of fur balls in the living room.
Do you suppose that makes me a sexist pig?
Love,
K-B
Crossposted at San Diego Gay & Lesbian News.
Granite Construction Corporation continues to demand public approval to develop the Liberty Quarry project — despite the damage it would do to the lands, the wildlife and the people in De Luz, Fallbrook, Rainbow, Temecula, Camp Pendleton and beyond.
Granite’s for-profit quarry development would damage the Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve; the last wildlife corridor between the Santa Ana Mountains and the Palomar Mountain Range; the Santa Margarita River, our last free-flowing river in Southern California; Native American sacred sites; Camp Pendleton’s ground water; and the air we breathe.
Just as important, Granite Construction Corporation and the supposed public approval process threaten to damage the public — the majority of people in the target area, who do not want the quarry in this location.
Stop the corporate minority from damaging our majority, our quality of life, our environment, our heritage, our right to say no to being harmed by corporate greed.
Sign the petition! Click here to Save Our Last River.
A guest column by Joe Crews, gay veteran
It was San Diego’s biggest party of the year, the Gay Pride Parade last Saturday, attended by over 150,000 celebrants and a tiny few, but amusing, religious castigators. Best of all, it was a historic event, the nation’s first ever Pride Parade with a marching unit of openly identified active duty military personnel. The phalanx of jubilant sailors, Marines, soldiers and airmen wore civvies, but were followed by a squad of trim and muscular young men in uniform — of a sort. They were wearing only Marine-style camouflage bikinis as they danced and cavorted the two miles from Normal Street (yes, Normal Street) in Hillcrest to Balboa Park. Supposedly none of the bikini boys were active military, though some had classic jarhead appearance.
Because parade organizers placed highest priority on our gay and lesbian troops, and the impending repeal of DADT, my marching unit, Veterans for Peace, was placed near the front, number six of over 225 units. We stepped out sharply at 11:00 a.m., but the last unit did not arrive at Balboa Park until 2 hours and 45 minutes later. I was so exhilarated by the raucous public delight that we Vets for Peace were supporting gays in the military that, when we reached the park, I doubled back and joined another unit, the Free Bradley Manning platoon. I carried my large, colorful homemade sign “Free Bradley Manning – HERO!” The young, gay soldier from Oklahoma, the highly ethical Manning is a cause célèbre in the gay community ever since the military locked him away in extreme solitary confinement.
I marched at least seven miles in Saturday‘s parade, more than any time since I was in basic training at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas in 1962. After completing the second march, I just watched another 90 minutes of the parade, amused and at times almost stunned with the audacity and cleverness of paraders.
There was a long string of local politicians in convertibles and grand antique automobiles, from Mayor Jerry Sanders on down, including several other candidates for mayor. Cops and corporations marched, drag queens and daddy bears, Chihuahua lovers and a parade of adorable pugs in little perambulators, comic heroes from Superman to the Green Lantern to Wonder Woman. Everything and everybody from the bizarre to the beautiful.
At least 50 religious groups marched, including Jews, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, Unitarians, Buddhists and spiritualists. But no Baptists, at least as publicly identified. They sang hymns, chanted, passed out literature and embraced each other with love and charity. My favorite was the group Gaytheists who carried signs urging President Obama to “Evolve already!” referencing the president’s very slow movement to marriage equality, which he has described as a “personal evolutionary process.” One of the gaytheists waved a colorful sign stating “Gay the pray away,” referencing the slogan of the Christian homophobic “reparative” therapy for “curing” gays with prayer and Bible reading: “Pray the gay away.” One marcher shouted out “We are on to your husband, Michele Bachman!” It is widely commented in the gay community that Marcus Bachmann is too nellie to be straight. Comedian Jon Stewart called Bachmann “an Izod shirt away from being the gay character on Modern Family.”
Well, somebody did a lot of praying, because everybody was out. And the troops are out to stay out. They ain’t going back in that closet. And they are very happy about it.
Newsweek magazine’s blatantly sexist cover image of Bachmann, declaring her the “Queen of Rage,” actually elicited a complaint from National Organization for Women (NOW). Yowza, what a coupling! If Bachmann’s campaign lasts, NOW will surely do all it can to otherwise denounce her for her homophobia, anti-women’s and civil rights positions, and bent toward theocracy. But in the meantime, fun, fun, fun!
Yep, real Christian men prefer their womenfolk scared. An entertaining juxtaposition with the frequent suggestions that Bachmann herself is kind of scary.
