happy birthday, Lydia Davis (a day late)

spending hours

staring

out a window, observing

a neighbor’s cows

tossing french verbs

at the ceiling

seeing what sticks

even the smallest thing will be observed

how a word sounds

and

how a word sounds when

there are different words around it

ready to confront a demon or a god

Who doesn't love a lady warrior? Well, probably a lot of people. But here's to Tomoe Gozen, March 15th's woman of the day, a female samurai in 12th century Japan.

If I don't have a lot to say about Tomoe, it's mostly because not a lot is known about her. For example, why did she become a samurai? And how? And how did the other samurai feel about her? And did she care?

My personal fascination with women who fight "men's" fights stems back to a childhood spent reading and re-reading and re-reading Tamora Pierce's Song of the Lioness quartet and no I am not joking. I wanted to be a knight and I wanted to have red hair and purple eyes and a talking cat and magical powers and also I wanted my name to be Alanna and I was nine years old, so bite your tongue. 

Cheers, at any rate, to Tomoe.

dream, dream, dream

really? she could be a supreme court justice? Wow. We should be so lucky. But we probably won't.

what a babe

Sometimes it seems easy to believe that there is a secret cadre of old, white, heterosexual men sitting and smoking cigars on the top floor of some endless skyscraper, organizing and implementing misogyny for the world. Consider music. Historically, the majority of songs that are performed by women are written, produced, distributed, and promoted by men. I think about this when I hear a woman singing about how if her man leaves her she'll die, or how she can forgive him anything, she can't help herself, she loves him so, etc. I think to myself, it's insidious. As a girl, you want to relate to the singer, you want to feel what she's feeling. After all, music is almost more persuasion than narration. But what she's selling is self-abnegation and patriarchy.

Of course, there are plenty of exceptions: "He hit me and it felt like a kiss" was penned by Carole King. Now some may say that the song was meant as protest, or satire. Maybe it was. I certainly don't hear that when I listen to it, much as I would like to.

I don't take my conspiracy theories very seriously, though. Nonetheless, it's nice to have someone come along and flip all that shy-retiring-butterfly business upside down. Enter into my life, Ruth Brown.

I think I just love her. She's sassy and licentious and suggestive and sexy. Sure, she has some songs about moping and waiting and hoping he'll come back, but to my mind she more than makes up for it with her songs about being wild and desiring as well as desirable. But I think my fate was sealed with "That Train Don't Stop Here Anymore." I didn't care for the overall sound of the song - a later work - and the subject matter I thought, at first, was a bit of a yawner. Ruth was waiting for her philandering man to come home, but she knew he never would because [insert title here]. However, at the end of the song, Ruth starts talking. And you understand why she was the original Motormouth Maybelle. She spends the second half of the song talking out the other side of her mouth "Did you see him leave? I hope he had a suitcase, 'cause he's got a one-way ticket. I told the conductor, don't even slow down, 'cause there ain't nothing here for him...any train. Take him out of here. I'm so sick and tired of him playin' me for a fool..." And on an on. For about three minutes. For the first half of the song, the lyrics seem to be mourning the impossibility of the man ever returning, yet vowing eternal fidelity. The second half flips it entirely. The fact that the train doesn't stop here anymore is not only not cause for grief, but in fact is caused by the singer. She is making sure that the train won't stop. The position of the narrator moves from one of victim to agent. I can't help but feel that Ruth's giving the boot to all the men in all the songs who did wrong and thought they could come back home anyway. Fictional revenge on a fictitious character. Fine by me, anytime.

it's a great time to have a hero

I never would have said this in high school, but I really, really want to be a cheerleader.

For Kima Greggs.


Actually, think I want to be her sidekick. Yes, that’s more like it. I would REALLY like to be her sidekick. As far as I can see, the only potential obstacles that could possibly prevent me from achieving this goal are:
- she’s a fictional character
- her show is over
- she doesn’t really need a sidekick

Aside from that, I don’t anticipate any problems.

If you haven’t watched The Wire, which yes I know is over, but I am slow – and perennially dragging my feet at the end of the pop-culture parade, long after the band, the mayor, the beauty queens, and the float for the county feed store – and so I’m only partway through the second of five seasons. Thus far, at any rate, Kima Greggs is a hard-ass, semi-butch, wise-cracking, take-no-shit, African American lesbian cop. What a non-stereotypical television character, and yet the show is written in a way that shows the variety of human experience and nature, rather than dealing in easily recognizable cardboard people. So she doesn't stand out as "different," she's not a foil for a cute blond ladycop. Kima ain't no lady. Don't take my word for it, she'll tell you. I’m having a hard time recalling when – if ever – I admired a fictional tv character to this extent. Probably the closest runner-up is Alex Mack, but that was when I was about 12, so a few things have changed since then.

But how could I respond with anything but unbridled enthusiasm for a female character that is smart, confident, pragmatic, tough, funny, bold, unintimidated and unimpressed by the shenanigans and horseplay of her less committed and generally less intelligent colleagues, who are almost uniformly male. I think Sonja Sohn, the actor who plays Kima, is nothing short of tremendously perfect in the role, to understate the case a bit. I wondered briefly whether I was more interested in the actor or the character, and quickly decided that while I’d be happy to see Sohn do something else in the future, Kima Greggs is the one I’m really rooting for. And I do mean rooting – I watch Kima with nothing short of glee, occasionally augmented by verbal encouragement. This is how I find myself at times: alone in my room, watching a 4-year old tv program on my laptop; generally silent, but with occasional cheers.

Which tangentially, reminds me of when I was grocery shopping this evening. There was an old lady, who seemed more than a bit off. She was walking in uneven circles, pushing her cart around the store, and talking out loud. At one point I saw her stop in front of the Haribo display, and start singing in a warbly voice “Hallelujah” over and over, until she quit because she started laughing. For a moment I thought: she’s crazy, and then I thought: no, she’s just like me, only louder.