April 2005 – Page 8

Poets: A Request

I’m working on my unit plan on poetry and have run into a writing wall. I’m drawing blanks on post-Reconstruction American poets and need some examples of poets who are usable in a public high school. Not to mention compelling enough to use in a high school.

Funny that I can come up with tons for the blog, but not for school. Wonderful.

Any and all suggestions are welcome. The sooner the better.

Controversial Feminist Andrea Dworkin Dead at 58

Despite being among the most vilified and controversial members of the movement, many of her ideas took hold of me during my early days of feminist discovery.

Briefly, Rad Geek has a good round-up. Charles says:

Those of you who know something about Andrea Dworkin’s life know that it has not been an easy one. The words that she spoke and the lines that she drew came out of intense pain, passionate commitment, and a deep compassion for women—women who had lived through the hell that she had lived through, and women whose struggles she made her struggle every day. I can only hope that she will have the peace that she could not have in life. And that we here can honor her by carrying on in the struggle that was her life’s work.

Amen.

Still on Hiatus

I’m still on hiatus with no signs of coming back to the blog world as per the completion of deadlines and projects.

The guestbloggers are doing a wonderful job and have provided me plenty of optimum reading material even though I’m technically off the blog. Any guest poster who wants to keep it going is free to do so until I’m back. No dates as of yet.

NPM: Sylvia Plath

It should be a requirement of all angsty adolescent girls to read and adore Sylvia Plath. Like I did. I wrote lines from her poems all over my notebooks and school things: “like the cat I have nine times to die”

“Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well. / I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real.”

“Out of the ash /I rise with my red hair /And I eat men like air.”

I forget sometimes how poignant Plath is, having permanently associated her with my teen years. I wonder what her last book of poetry would have looked like had her estranged widower, Ted Hughes, not destroyed it.

Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it–

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?–

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot–
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart–
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash–
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there–

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr god, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

See more at PlathOnline, built and maintained by Emily of Strangechord.

Horowitz: The Man from Self-Victimizationville

Getting Some Business Out of the Way, or The (Much) Shorter Version of What Happened Last Night

No pies.^†
No streaking.
Lots of heckling and a few protest signs.
Horowitz did not convince me of the necessity for a Hoosier Academic Bill of Rights (HABR).

The Longer Version, In Which I Realize that Horowitz is a Depressing & Irrelevant Individual

Fellow Feministers, please don’t regret that you missed the Horowitz lecture, unless of course you were in the mood for some neoconservative political theatre. Please read on to experience vicarious cringing, laughter, and sadness.

Friday Random Ten: Project Guest Blog Edition

Thought I’d do my Friday Random Ten this week at feministe’s guest lodging, rather than my own digs, farkleberries. Here goes:

Out Hud – Dad, There’s a Little Thing Called Too Much Information (A cracking good song for nighttime “L” rides)
Haunted House – Cowboy Light (A strange but darned catchy song. Horribly overmodulated by intention, with near-nonsense lyrics and a backing track that sounds like Phil Spector and Jeff Lynne fighting about who plugged the recording console into the 220V line by mistake. Meanwhile, Liberace’s ghost smiles beneficently over the fracas.) Sample lyrics:

I can see your swimming pool, but I won´t fall in
And I can see the firemen sleeping in the trees
This room has burning disco walls and I can’t find the dance floor
I need to smoke my scoobies out so help me find some wood
Tomorrow night is cowboy night, so let’s go steal a horse
This stallion is drowning in a world of cowboy light
50 Cent feat. G-Unit – Hate It or Love It (Hate the lyrics, love the music. I have a complicated relationship with rap.)
Morcheeba – Everybody Loves a Loser
O-Zone – Dragostea Din Tei (The world’s best selling Moldovan-Romanian hit song!)
Otep – My Confession (Poetic, apocalyptic metal band fronted by a lesbian vocalist. That is not a typo.)
Michelle Shocked – Anchorage (Oh, memories of my college radio days!)
Joan Jett – The French Song (One of my most-listened-to songs, ever. Kick-ass and unabashedly sexual, I’ve been dying to cook up a remix/mashup of this track for years. By the way, Western Washington University professor Kathleen Kennedy wrote a fascinating scholarly article called “Results of a Misspent Youth: Joan Jett’s performance of female masculinity” that analyzes how the artist’s “various performances of female masculinity challenged conventional understandings of masculinity and femininity [and] enabled her to carve a space for herself in a male-dominated genre.” Very cool stuff.)
Atomizer – Hooked on Radiation (Bad Boy Remix) (Not just for the boys, this big fat earworm-y circuit party groove with anthemic Gary Glitter-ish lyrics clamps itself firmly to your dancing bone. Has some strange connection to KLF raconteur Jimmy Cauty, the genderbending London club Nag Nag Nag, and “DJ Jonny Slut.” That explains it all.)
Sarah Vaughan – Fever (Adam Vreeland remix) (From the delightful new compilation Verve Remixed 3)

Pablo Helps With Homework

Sweet Lil P just left me a present on the floor. By present I mean puked up more pink ribbon in the shape of my foot directly outside my office door.

Ethan likes to talk about Pablo with strangers we meet at the grocery store or chat with at the little park around the block from our house. His favorite talking point: “Pablo throws up every Saturday. He has hairballs!”

Pablo helps me with homework my jumping on my lap, shoving his nose into mine, and stepping all over the keyboard. Bad kitty.

Friday Random Ten – The Procrastination of Deadlines Edition

If it’s Friday somewhere, it’s time for the Friday Random Ten.

Make sure your boss isn’t around, load up all your mp3s to your favorite player, and list the first ten that appear. Rock out in your cubicle and thank your higher-power-of-choice that it’s Friday. Fellow atheists, thank yourself for having the proverbial cajones to last another week of daily drudgery. Has it been that kind of week for anyone else?

1) The Cramps – All Women Are Bad (what a thing to post on a feminist blog. hm.)
2) Joan Jett – Wild Thing
3) Louis XIV – Finding Out True Love Is Blind
4) Reverend Horton Heat – D is for Dangerous
5) Pixies – There Goes My Gun
6) Erykah Badu – Bag Lady (Tricky remix)
7) Rappin’ 4-Tay – I’ll Be Around
8) Donovan – Wear Your Love Like Heaven
9) Princess Superstar – Fuck the Phone
10) The Blasters – Marie, Marie

And an extra: In honor of the lesson plan I am scheduled to teach tomorrow morning, here is a rather elegant recording of T.S. Eliot reading his famous poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” PC users, right click save as. You snobby Mac users do whatever it is you do.

Poetry

Continuing National Poetry Month, I present my favorite poet, Langston Hughes. I have a huge interest in race relations in the United States, because those relations have had such a tremendous impact on our history as a nation. Hughes’ poetry and other writings were explicitly about race relations in the years following the first World War, but much of it still has relevance today. I believe the following poem, Children’s Rhymes, is one such work.

By what sends
the white kids
I ain’t sent:
I know I can’t
be President.

What don’t bug
them white kids
sure bugs me:
We know everybody
ain’t free.

Lies written down
for white folks
ain’t for us a-tall:
Liberty And Justice—
Huh!–For All?

Zubulake

Zubu-what?

Zubulake (pronounced, I believe, Zoo-boo-LAH-kie). As the NY Times tells us, this is Laura Zubulake. She won.

Now, for you, this happened today. But I’m a litigator, and though I’m not involved in the case, this has been happening for two years. Why? Because UBS, her employer, screwed around with e-mails to hide the smoking guns. And got caught by U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin, one of the most influential women on a trial-level bench anywhere today. Scheindlin, much to UBS’s dismay, is the maven on electronic discovery, and she loves to write. So she literally wrote the book on electronic discovery– six or so published opinions that define the defendants’ obligations, and finally, impose sanctions on UBS.

So this is a win three times. Laura Zubulake walks away with back pay and statutory damages. All of us get a solid set of electronic discovery rules, ones that limit the burden on defendants but also put them on notice that tanking stuff will get them in trouble. And Judge Shira Scheindlin adds to her growing legend as a smart, gutsy judge who takes on thorny problems head-on.

But most of you don’t care about that. Here’s what struck me. Talking with colleagues (men) who were in financial services or have contacts there, the rumor is that Zubulake was an awful person to work with. My gut tells me this is UBS disinformation to try to win the case — the same was said about Allison Schieffelin (there’s a thru-link about Schieffelin in the story), though we’ll never know.

More importantly, so what? Let’s say she’s competent, and unbearable. In many businesses, including parts of Wall Street, some law firms, and places like Enron, asshole personality disorder is considered an acceptable trait — at least among the men. In fact, this was the UBS defense: essentially, that her boss was such an asshole to everyone that there’s no reason to believe it was motivated by gender animus.