AUDIO: Independence Day, 2008

On this, the fourth day of July, in the year 2008, we find cause to celebrate our vices:

We dedicate this day to that declaration which decreed the end of our subjugation to tyranny and the beginning of our addiction to war; we revel in all 232 glorious years, and it is in commemoration that we unleash facsimiles of rockets and missiles and mushroom clouds into the air above us, to the hushed awe of the crowds huddled in the summer darkness, shivering with explosive thrill at the seductive whisper of our collective power.

We dedicate this day to our addiction to the flesh and bone and blood of our Mother; to $4 a gallon gasoline from the luxurious view afforded us from the windows of our SUVs; to the labor and sweat and crushed souls of those who toil for our convenience across oceans and earth, where, if we cannot easily see, no knowledge of modern slavery will penetrate to trouble our serene national psyche.

We dedicate this day to our Berlin border wall, to the 1,952 mile stretch of desperation and despair, to blind nationalism and xenophobia, because no one born outside these arbitrary borders, truly, can be completely human; we relish our corporate addiction to cheap labor and union busting, to salmonella-laced produce and lead-based toys and always low prices delivered with a brilliant yellow grin.

We dedicate this day to warrantless wiretapping with bipartisan immunity from prosecution, to spying on citizens in the event they should commit thought crimes and rebel; we dedicate this day to American fascism, to Big Brother government with none of the perks, to the Red Scare, to Black Lists and Do Not Fly; we dedicate this day to busting down doors, shoot first ask questions later.

We dedicate this day to the spiritual vacuum left in the wake of postmodernism, pining for the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus and Satan; we gnash our teeth and wail and cry because there is nothing left to believe in except, perhaps, that through war and waste and endless consumption, through wage slavery and sex trafficking and industrial abuse, through blind faith that all is well and a refusal to acknowledge the possibility that anything can and should be different, we will find salvation and we will not rot in Hell.

On this day we find cause to celebrate the occasion of our dependence, and we call ourselves free.

You and I are living in the swollen heart of dead America. We are in the cold clammy hands, the blank stare fixed on every television screen and wondering which box office hit might be our new Messiah; we are every muscle, aching, stiff with rigor mortis, unwilling to relax our failing grip knowing that we are dead even if we are not consciously aware of that reality, seeing speaking hearing no evil and disregarding any indication that we are not Superman and baseball and apple pie and that this is not our world to plunder any longer. We are the hard cock yearning to subjugate and conquer because otherwise we might be the willing split between thighs spread wide, or worse, unwilling and unavoidably vulnerable. We are sweat and blood and excrement accumulated and not yet dry, layers on layers of fresh toil and pain and fear caked on with each passing year to hide the reeking evidence the past has left behind…beneath it all, America does not even wear skin on its skeleton to shield its delicate and vital machinations from exposure: this emperor, like all others to come before and after him, has no clothes, no function, no blood beating through his veins and thus no humanity, no soul.

You and I are mired, here, within this lumbering monster of a nation, denying we are staring out its eyes into the sky from the bed of an unfinished grave.

The specifics of geography and location do not exactly matter; this is a systemic condition and the same stores-in-a-box and burger joints can be found, now, in Anytown, USA., can be observed with a clinical distance and dispassion in any number of cancerous microcosms working their destruction across the face of the whole. But you and I are here, in the midst of a quiet unassuming Denver suburb whose name means Town of Thorns on an empty and desolate Sunday afternoon.

This place is slow poison; nothing can flourish here, nothing can grow, this is not like the city where there is color or the country where there is life. This is not skyscrapers miming Babel and homeless vets huddled in blankets of newspaper, and it is not rolling prairie or purple mountains’ majesty. This is not art galleries and it is not a stroll so breathtaking in altitude our mutually asthmatic selves must pause for air as we stare down at the city below. This is not pleasure in pain, it is not happiness, and it is not life.

AUDIO: A Call To Arms

This is the Great American Scream, this is the sound of one million disenchanted voices waking from their fairytale slumber to see the devastation laid before them, the havoc and destruction wrought upon us by our fathers and our mothers and their fathers and mothers and each successive preceding generation — back to ancient times when the first woman alive plucked knowledge of right and wrong from the Kabalistic concept they call the Tree of Life, shortly before Manifest Destiny was decreed and Eden was paved over to make way for a Wal*Mart Superstore and a McDonalds, so no one knew what right or wrong was anymore, ever, anyhow.

This is the agony of separation, imaginary friends behind bars like the common thought criminals they are and the real kind virtually imaginary; this is the sound of grandma’s funeral or a dead pet or unrequited love combusting in the ashes of the WTC towers like your own private Hiroshima and that of an entire generation; this is the girl crying out beneath her lover’s expert hands as he manipulates her, contorts her with pleasure and anguish in ways she did not think possible until now; this is the pulse, the breath, the heartbeat, the collective sob, the universal gasp for air underwater; this is the voice that is better seen and not heard; this is ecstasy in anarchy, order in chaos and chaos in order; this is the What Would Jesus Do and Follow the Rules collapsing beneath the colossal weight of their own bullshit; this is a rape victim sentenced to 200 lashes for speaking up about it, this is 70¢ to a man’s dollar, this is fuck-me heels and miniskirts and lipstick and upraised arms with hairy pits brandishing smoldering bras in defiance of the natural order; this is the raised middle finger, the turned back, the Fuck You mingled with ecstatic cries of Fuck Me; this is suicide bombers and Jessica Lynch and Tim McVeigh and Malcolm X; this is the vacant lot of the American Dream, and it has been condemned, boarded up, demolished; this is We Don’t Need No Education remixed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold; this is Yeats’ dream of WWIII slouching towards Iraq to be born; this is the thousand eyes of Moloch screaming without mouths, without words, and they are our eyes; this is the children of privilege being marched down the assembly line, realizing that the guillotine gleaming red with the life of every AIDs-infected starving Ethiopian child is still sharp and polished and hungry; this is a divorced single mother whose blood could stop cold in her veins and who could not pay a doctor to keep her from dying, while Congress issues orders to keep a woman who cannot drink or chew or swallow or move with no brain activity alive just in case, while a man’s teeth rot inside his face because nobody cares what happens to you if you don’t have a perfect white Hollywood smile, you might as well crawl into a ditch if you can’t find room at the inn or the shelter, you might as well die.
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AUDIO: Fairytales My Mother Told Me

When I was young, my mama told me, little girl, you can do, you can be whatever you please, and you can do anything that a boy can do, and you can be anything that a boy can be, and you can do it just as well and, maybe, even better. She told me, little girl, nothing in this world can ever stop you.

When I was young, my mama told me, little girl, fairytales do come true, and Prince Charming will come for you, and you can find true love that never dies. She told me, little girl, you can have faithfulness and fidelity, a perfect happy family, if you are good and follow all the rules.

When I was young, my mama told me, little girl, God has a plan, though it cannot be seen or felt or understood by man, and He will always forgive you and love you no matter what you do (at least if you do nothing really bad). She said, He wants us all to be together for eternity, so if you do all that I say he said, maybe when we die in Heaven we can see each other, always be with one another, again.

Look out.

Look out the bedroom window to the street–if it faces the street–and see it stretching like two long arms reaching forever and ever (or maybe not so far) in either direction. Let your line of sight be directed down a meandering road that may, in this corporeal world, terminate to the North, but which, some of us know, really leads West, West, further and further back, winding down through Grand Junction or up through Yellowstone past the Rockies to that body of water, a landlocked sea, dead to everyone and everything but the putrid flies and bugs inhabiting it, and the seagulls glutting themselves upon its salty shores. Let it take you further, submerge you in the Platte and then sweep you away, down, down toward Mexico to escape an invented persecution with two wives and too many mouths to feed and to Guatemala with pretensions of
Spanish aristocracy.

This is where we come from. This is where we’ve been.

Look out.

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Hey, everybody. Thought it couldn’t hurt to post about the little project the guy and I are working on here! Sorry to my friends who will be seeing this pop up everywhere.

Electronic Quiver: Winter Issue
Call for Submissions

Electronic Quiver, the quarterly print publication from Razee Ink, is looking for submissions for its winter issue on the theme “Choke: The Effects of PTSD”. We are accepting submissions of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art on the theme of PTSD, the anti-war movement, and general radical/left-wing politics and activism. A diversity of viewpoints and perspectives is welcome and encouraged; we are interested in seeing work by queer, feminist, PoC, and other minority voices.

Payment is in copies, as we are a small, membership-funded organization.

Deadline: November 9, 2007

Please email submissions to the editor, D. J. Razee, razee@razee.com . Be sure to specify that you are sending a submission for EQ in the subject line.

A shout out to those of you on LiveJournal: I’m starting a new community for feminist writers. There are a several purposes to this community: to receive comments and criticism of your writing from fellow members, to dicuss writers and writing, to promote the published writing of community members, and to provide information about publishers seeking submissions of material which fits the scope of the community. So if you write fiction in your free time, or you just blog, please check it out. All genres and styles are welcome, including fiction, poetry, and nonfiction essays and articles!

Read the rules and decide if this is the community for you — it is not a exactly safe space, but there’s a lot of things I won’t put up with, either, because I truly believe there need to be some standards in order to maintain a “feminist” community and not a “debate with anti-feminists” community.

I don’t normally post about science fiction related things here, since it’s not really the focus of the blog (although that will probably change since it’s pretty much my life right now), but it is something I’m really into. So, NPR had a story yesterday about James Tiptree, Jr., called The Secret Sci-Fi Life of Alice B. Sheldon. They interviewed the author of a new biography of Tiptree that came out earlier this year. This isn’t news to me, and won’t be to some of you, but I still thought it was really cool to hear something about such an influential female SF writer on a mainstream program.

For those of you who don’t know who she was and don’t want to have to follow the link, I’ll sum up with the written introduction on the NPR page:

Science fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr. earned the reputation of being a male author who understood women.

Tiptree’s stories often addressed gender issues — on Earth and in worlds beyond.

One story in particular involves a woman opting to live with an alien nation, for the sole reason of avoiding the feeling of confinement she has in her male-dominated society.

There was a deep secret behind Tiptree’s sensitivity: In reality, he was a she. Alice B. Sheldon (1915 - 1987) used the male pen name to write in a time when male authors could expect more success in the realm of science fiction.

Julie Phillips wrote James Tiptree, Jr., a biography subtitled: “The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.” Phillips tells Andrea Seabrook why she was inspired to write the book, more about who Sheldon was and how the nom de plume changed Sheldon’s life.

Tiptree has really been an influence on my life and writing. Not because I’ve been influenced greatly by her style and subject matter, although I do think some of her writing is excellent, but more because her life and approach to it is so fascinating. I’ve always found the “feminine” gender role limiting. Until a few years ago, growing up, I felt I could solely identify with male role models, because I knew of few women who lived the sorts of lives men have always been allowed. It seemed that being female, feminine, limited you to a certain set of expectations, potentials, possibilities. Whereas being male or at least acting like it allowed anything to be possible. Men could do anything, be anyone. Women could be wives, mothers, and love interests. (Failing that, temptresses, witches, and Lady Macbeth. These have always been the feminine archetypes I preferred.)

I grew up in Utah, where gender roles and gendered expectations are alive and well and much more overt than in many other parts of the US, and this profoundly affected me. My mother was surprisingly feminist considering her background, and even though she was a stay at home mother of five (who now regrets her decision not to work), she always told me there was nothing wrong with being a girl and that I could do anything I wanted to do, anything a boy could. This was all well and good, but unfortunately, even if our parents are wonderful they are not the only influences on our life, and what I heard from my mother seemed to contradict the reality that assaulted me every day.

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On AlterNet: Hating the Hate Mail. It’s all good, so you should just go read it now. But if you want to know what it’s about, an excerpt:

The psychic impact of hate mail is something female writers don’t often talk about in fear of appearing vulnerable in the male world of opinion writing. I believe women can take the heat of opinion journalism as well as any man; the problem is that the heat we take and the reasons why are very different.

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times discussed reactions to female opinion in her column last year. “While a man writing a column taking on the powerful may be seen as authoritative, a woman doing the same thing may be seen as castrating.” She went on to say she called Alan Dundes, a renowned folklorist, to ask about it. “Women are supposed to take it, not dish it out,” Dundes told her.

Any woman who writes or blogs on political (not even necessarily feminist!) issues can tell you all about this. I doubt men are as often targeted with threats of violence just for being men. Hate mail I’ve gotten when presumed to be male has been bad too, but not nearly on the same level as I get when I make my sex clear.

I think this relates to the article on women being disproportionately harassed online. It’s the same attitude, coming from the same place. Just being a woman is enough to make you an appropriate victim (after all, how many female rape victims are presumed to be “asking for it” simply for wearing certain clothes or being friendly, things which are simultaneously promoted as somehow intrinsically”feminine”?), but if you’re a woman and you dare to have an opinion… WELL.

I think I’ve got most of the even remotely interesting posts back up and in the right places (yanno, every post that isn’t just me posting about how I haven’t posted anything interesting and the like), so permalinks should work again. Uh…I just lost all the comments on them since I didn’t have any backups. Sorry, since there was some interesting discussion on some of them.

I’ll post something actually interesting maybe later.

For now, I guess the only things I have to say I’ve been putting into chapter 12 of Beauty. Are you all up for a rough-draft novel excerpt that might be thought-provoking, in which non-gender-normative characters of various species discuss love and polyamory, not-so-subtle racial/cultural allegories, and the patriarchy?

Yeah, it’s a big chunk of just dialogue and setting/backstory, and it’s totally all over the place. I swear stuff actually happens in the book besides the characters all sounding pompous and intellectual, but I can’t post any of that out of context, really, without lots of explanation.