pretty dumb things

so many words, so little skin

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single tattoo in possession of open space is in want of some company. Which is to say that my intermittent compulsion to get inked seems to come not from my conscious but rather arises from my flesh itself. This feeling is, of course, imaginary. I realize the limitations of my skin; its cognizance is limited to expressions that feel metaphorically onomatopoetic. “Ow!”, “mmmm!” and “eesh!” are about as articulate as my soft tissue gets. The time has come to get tattooed, for my usually dumb dermis has started to scream.

books, books, books and a loss of loss

I read an awful lot, though I tend to hoard more books than I actually read. When I die, I’ll most likely be sent to a revision of Dante’s fourth level of hell. I imagine myself in the crowd of other bibliomaniacs like Oprah and Edward VI, all of us pushing giant library carts stuffed with triple-decker Victorian novels and non-sequential volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary shouting, “Hoard them! Hoard them!” and we’ll crash thunderously against an opposing stream of people like Anthony Comstock and Sarah Palin pushing carts full of Harry Potter and The Origin of the Species and screaming, “Burn them! Burn them!” Either that, or I’ll spend eternity at the roots of some giant tree that forever lashes me with its branches, should the pagans be right.

I don’t read as much as some people, but I do spend a fair amount of my time reading something—often things on the Internet, but more often books. I live my life awash in narrative, and I’m fine with that. I firmly believe in the transformative, explanatory and healing power of a good story. Fictions—and all stories are fictions, even those based in fact, perhaps especially those based in fact—are necessary. Fictions bring order to the roiling chaos of our interior lives. Stories are what we tell ourselves and to others in an incessant effort to make sense of everything from the trajectory of a career, to the rise and fall of empires, to the gravitational swirl of planets, toilets and love.

A reader recently asked me how many books I’ve read. The answer is I don’t know, and this uncertain hole sits at the center of this piece. I tend to juggle three or four books simultaneously. Right now, I’m concurrently reading Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory; Harry Potter 7, The Deathly Hollows; Jan Bondeson’s A Cabinet of Medical Curiousities; and Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire. I’m about twenty pages into the first, 400 into the second, 150 into the third, and 25 into the last. I also have four other books next to my bed in various stages of neglect: Dicken’s Great Expectations; a collection of Pulp fiction, the all-crime edition; an annotated Dracula (I have three different versions); and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which if I’m going to be honest with myself I may not get through again. Right now.

I will read just about anything but historical non-fiction, sports books and technical manuals. The first bores me, the second confounds me, and the third is like reading English translated into Klingon and then back into English. In the past two months, I’ve finished something like eighteen books (five graphic novels, two memoirs, six novels (three juvenile fiction), three noir novels, a great book on writing, and one book that defies genre on these totally macabre dollhouses that this woman spent her dotage building in order to train cops on reading crime scenes); these are all in addition to the books beside, in, and around my bed that I named in the previous paragraph. Currently, my favorite bed partners are books, which is either a sad state of affairs or not, depending on your point of view and level of friskiness.

I have three bookshelves that stand three feet wide and about seven feet tall. But for one shelf’s worth of space, they are jam-packed with books. I’ve read about 7/10 of the books on these shelves completely or nearly completely. I just got a book in the mail today (David Lynch’s meditation book), one last week (Titters, the 1976 anthology of female humor), and I’m expecting another any day (Michael Chabon’s new collection of essays, which I ordered from McSweeney’s).  If I had to name my top last few books, they’d have to be that weird dollhouse book, The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death; Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and his The Graveyard Book; Nabokov’s Lolita, which I just reread and loved as passionately as the first time I read it twenty-five years ago; and Dark Banquet, this fantastic book on sanguivores by Bill Schutt. If you love leeches like I love leeches, you need this book.

On any given day, I have about sixty books on my Amazon wish list. Unsurprisingly, they’re from a hodgepodge of genres and by a cavalcade of authors. There are books by astrophysicists, and there are books on eighteenth-century coffee house culture. I’ve picked out three books on fashion, four graphic novels, two epidemiological books, a couple on politics, one on robotics and another on the sex-life of insects. There are also a bunch of run-of-the-mill novels.  I have catholic tastes in reading.

And yet, as much as I read now, and as much as I love it, I rarely experience the kind of slip-sliding of self that would occur when I was young. It started when, at about the age of seven, I discovered I could read to myself, and it lasted until my mid-twenties. I would read a book and I would be thoroughly immersed in it, submerged in its narrative thrall as I am in my dreams. I would rise only when called by necessity—the urgent press of pee, the undodgeable phone call, the unshirkable presence of a parent, boyfriend or friend. Then I would struggle through the narrative’s pool back to consciousness; I would put the book down with truculent reluctance; and I would fret until my return.

These days, I don’t suffer that sublime loss of consciousness that I remember from my reading youth.  I don’t know if it’s age or experience or the years I spent in school dissecting writing like an anatomist bent over a cadaver. I don’t know if it’s because I myself am writing more, and therefore I’m acutely aware of every mercurial turn of phrase, of each shifting transition, of each song of syntax, and when or where those turns, transitions and syntactical choices fall flat. I imagine being a writer and reading is not unlike being a musician who hears an orchestra attuned not just to the swell and fall of the symphony but also to the piccoloist who just isn’t pulling his or her woodwind weight. No matter what, I am aware that what I’m doing is reading. It’s a drag.

I miss the great escape that books once gave. I chase that fall from consciousness like I’ve read about heroin addicts chasing their first high. I read consumptively.  I read, in no small part, because I’m searching for that book that once more will give me what I’ve lost: the pure immersion into a seamless story more wondrous, more ghastly, more pathetic, more beautiful, and more real than my own.

a period piece; or a call for the end of bloody segregation

I am a menstruating woman. Which is both to say that I am a woman who menstruates—and therefore neither one who has not yet started nor one who has ceased to menstruate—and to say that right now, this moment, as I write this piece, I have my period. Now 46, I’ve been getting my period approximately once a month for the past 33 years and seven months; I’ve had something around 395 periods, give or take a couple for pregnancies, anomalies and bad math. Factoring the length of my average period of five days, I’ve spent 1,975 days or just under five-and-a-half years on the rag, as it were.

Thus I know of what I speak. A lot of time has passed since my very first period at the age of twelve in August, 1975. Yet I still remember it as I remember very few specific days. I know that then, as now, my period appeared at around 5:00 p.m. I know that I was lying on my belly watching some program on my family’s tiny black-and-white television. I know that I felt an alien low-grade fire deep in my underbelly, a strange and unparseable pain that remains strange and unparseable to this day. I remember getting up, going to the bathroom, sitting on the toilet and finding that crimson smear in my white panties. I remember sighing heavily and then pragmatically and reluctantly donning the belt-and-pad contraption my grandmother had bought me some months earlier.

I remember feeling exactly how stupid that thing was with its weird bra-strap elastic and its strange little buckles. I remember hating the thickness of the pad and fretting over its visibility. I remember hating the whole kit-and-caboodle, this-girl-is-a-woman-now stupidity of it. I remember telling my mother, and I remember asking her not to tell my father, and I remember that she did anyway. I remember finding out about her betrayal when, after I said something to my dad about having a stomach ache, he turned to me from the driver’s seat of the car and said something along the lines of “Some ladies when they have their periods feel pain” and then launched into a disquisition about how female clitorises were actually larger than penises and I shouldn’t feel badly. I remember feeling absolutely mortified. As well as angry.

I remember the next day that I was supposed to go to the beach, and I remember spending at least two hours in the painful and ultimately triumphant endeavor of stuffing my mother’s super industrial-sized tampon into my twelve year-old vagina, something that took so long we never got to the beach. I remember crying with anger and pain in the process, and I remember crying with anger and pain later when I discovered that tampons also came in “slender,” the size I still use to this day. I remember the week of my first period as I remember few other swaths of time. Perhaps only one other week in my life retains the color-saturated details of my first menstrual week.

I’m fairly certain that I’m not alone in my ability to summon this specific memory, even without the aid of a sanguine Madeleine. The breathy anticipation surrounding the release of eighteen-year-old Rachel Kauder’s My Little Red Book, an anthology of first-person first-period stories, argues the power that these memories hold for women. The truism that we all are born alone and we all die alone might be modified to say that we women all go through our first period alone too, even if we are surrounded by people. On a fundamental level, it’s an experience that every woman has on her own, as much as it forms a bond between us.

I don’t have an issue with this book—it’s a fairly brilliant premise. I may read it; I may not. I don’t have a whole lot of patience with narrowly themed anthologies. But I can see the value in telling stories. Narratives provide frameworks for the ways we experience our lives, for the ways we can make order out of chaos, and for the possibilities we might change. With these points in mind, I do have a problem with this book being cordoned off as a women’s book, a book that needs to be passed around under tables like Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret was in middle school, and a book that—above all—needs to be kept out of the hands of men.

Such is the way that New York Times reviewer Dr. Abigail Zuger treats it in her review, “In The Open At Last, A Secret That All Women Share.” Giving the context of private dressing rooms in Victoria’s Secret, the presence of segregated “men’s and ladies’” bathrooms at the musical Hair, and the continued acceptance of teaching Sex Ed to both genders separately, Dr. Zuger seems to want to keep period-talk within the confines of the red tent.

“At this point,” Dr. Zuger says about a third of the way through the review, “male readers may want to go outside and toss a ball around for a while. No matter how sympathetic, how curious or how deeply interested in life’s little yuck factors you are, this collection is unlikely to hold more than the mildest intellectual appeal for you. But it is hard to imagine any woman, from the most straitlaced and body-denying to the most uninhibited and body-embracing, who will not read right through it with pure enjoyment, small flashes of recognition and the urge to buy it for every female preteen in sight.” Oh, dear.

This is the part where I get angry with Dr. Zuger (although to be honest I'm already peeved by the end of the article's title). Because she assumes that men need to be protected by the “yuck factors” of our mysterious women's bodies. Because she suggests that men—the very men who may become fathers—ought to busy themselves with masculine activities centered on balls, rather than worry their tender little heads with our “female trouble.” Because she seems to argue that nothing—nothing—illustrates the difference between men’s and women’s bodies like the fact that once a month for most of women’s lives, we bleed, and that it’s our job as women to hide that bloody light under an absorbent cotton bushel.

It’s actually kind of ironic that Dr. Zuger feels the need to perpetuate the hoary gender separation that generations have constructed around menstruation—especially since she chooses to mention by name Gloria Steinem’s essay “If Men Could Menstruate.” Our culture has come up with a colorful run of phrases to sidestep the point-blank utterance of “I have my period.” Whether “Aunt Flo is here to visit,” or we’re “riding the cotton pony,” or we’ve “fallen off the roof,” or we’ve simply “got our friend,” we chicks perform linguistic loop-de-loops to hide our ever-present embarrassment over our “monthlies.” Even “feminine product” advertising employs the ubiquitous and incongruous blue liquid in their ads. Should I ever peer down at a pad or a tampon and see the cool blue of radiator fluid, I’d be fairly alarmed. Our culture, like Dr. Zuger, M.D., likes to euphemize menstruation—as goes death, constipation, and incontinence, so go periods.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ll not be shocked to discover that I, like Steinem, am really tired of treating menstruation like it’s some kind of sacred, if twee, rite. I don’t furtively buy menstruation gear. I have no problem sending my boyfriends out to pick up a pack of O.B. tampons for me. I’d like it if the world just grew up and got over their collective pool of ooginess about what women’s bodies do. For that reason, I think that if you do buy a copy of My Little Red Book for your pre-teen, as Dr. Zuger suggests you do, you should also buy one for any man with a close personal relationship to a woman. For the sake of women everywhere, and for the possibility of change in the future, your boyfriend, your daughter’s father, even your dad should probably read this book. Even if I don’t.

(You can find out-takes of My Little Red Book here, and you can even tell your own story, should you have one.)

to pee or not to pee, or freud had a point

live, direct and in the flesh

If you're in Gotham, delight in the carnal, love Susie Bright like I love Susie Bright, and want to see me read, you need to go to tonight's Very Special Episode of Rachel Kramer Bussel's erotic reading series In the Flesh. Every writer who is reading appears in Susie's bordello-scarlet anthology X: The Erotic Treasury. My story gets down and dirty, while I get down and scrubbing. It's both red hot and ice cold. And there's an audience, but only one person.

Intrigued? Of legal age? Come to Happy Endings at 302 Broome St. Show up early. Doors open at 7:00, the show starts at 7:30. It's free as air and twice as bracing. I'm going on just before the two headliners, so kind of late in the program.

And if you do come, please do say hi. I'll be the hot forty-something with excessively long blonde hair, a prodigious rack and the DVF white-purple-and-blue abstract print wrap dress. I only look like a total bitch; underneath, I'm a far bigger cupcake than anything Rachel will ever put in her mouth.

For more information, get thee to the In the Flesh blog.

of mutts and men

“Men are dogs,” people say in order to disparage the males of our species. Men are like dogs, presumably, because they tend toward the promiscuous, the easily distracted, and the eternally hunting. Like dogs, men will sniff all tails, hump anything animate and inanimate, eat trash with gusto, and do it all without any visible (and proper) shame. Men would lick their own balls if, like dogs, they were anatomically predisposed to doing so. Men would prefer to be low-down, lazy and dirty, like dogs. Men and dogs, above all, share an insatiable yen for pussy. And thus, men are dogs.

I actually like the men who are most like dogs. Think of it this way. Linguistically, the to-be verb “is” enacts the equal sign and, as we all know from algebra class, flipping an equation does not affect it. If A+B=C, then C=A+B. Therefore, if men are dogs, then dogs are men. (Likewise, if love is war, then war is love; if diamonds are a girl’s best friend, then a girl’s best friend is a diamond; if life is a bitch, then a bitch is life. And so on. Try it at home, it’s fun.) But as anyone who has ever stood on her head knows, what a difference an inversion makes in a Weltanschauung.

The concept “men are dogs” cherry-picks from a dog’s least desirable attributes (or those least desirable to human interaction; these traits seem to work just fine for canines). The sniffing, smelling, chasing, humping and indiscretion of dogs become those of men in the conventional metaphor. Flip the order and suddenly men are imbued with a whole new set of qualities. They’re trustworthy. They’re faithful. They’re noble. They’ll tell you when Timmy’s down the well, save babies from burning buildings, travel thousands of miles of treacherous terrain only to be with you, sleep happily and protectively at your feet, mourn when you leave, and jump with joy when you return—even if you only went downstairs to get the mail.

In my twenties, I considered myself a cat person. I looked askance at the dumb devotion of a dog. I mistrusted the unquestioning commitment of a canine. I derided the mute submission of the mutt. Why would I align myself with any creature that obligingly came when called? Give me the twitchy-tailed and haughty. At least cats were cool. I couldn’t imagine wanting a dog, even though I’d grown up with them and loved them.

Nearing thirty, I found myself changing, and I got the Legendary Spencer. He was everything I could ever want in a dog—smart, beautiful, connected, playful, funny, obliging, obedient and unequivocally mine. When he died, I was distraught, and then I adopted Boswell, who is as much like Spencer as he is different (he’s smart but neurotic, playful but frenetic, obedient but challenging, beautiful but a total goofball), and I realized that I am a dyed-in-the-wool, never-look-back dog person, and I’m good with that. More importantly, I realized that many of the qualities I love in my dog are the ones I desire in a man: intelligence, connection, commitment, affability, and a love of napping.

I do not, however much I like them both, want to treat men like dogs. I don't believe there's value in the wash of self-help manuals that suggest you can "train" your man using a metaphoric collar and leash, nor do I believe there's much value in the book that argues you can find love if you "pick your breed of man." Google the phrase "men are dogs" and you'll see a plethora of this kind of codswallop written with the intent to make women feel...something. If you want to train something, get a real dog. If you want to establish an equable relationship, find a real man.

I have written before of my Wookie fantasy. I recognize the embodiment of what I like in both men and dogs in Chewbacca. I suppose that doggy-man thing also explains my affection for Fedor Jefticheff (pictured above), Sirius Black from Harry Potter and my love of Oz in Buffy, especially Oz, the werewolf played by Seth Green. I would initially consider myself a Spike girl, but really the man who personifies the man I want is Oz—a whip-smart analytic dude whose offbeat cool masks the primal beast yowling beneath, the man who would literally go to the ends of the earth to find a way to be with me. Oz’s guitar playing would only be the icing on the dog biscuit.

Language shapes the way we think, and neither clichés nor metaphors are an exception. In my mind, men should be dogs: great, big, smelly, hairy, loving, wet-tongued dogs. I’m all for bringing out the mutts in men.

(And, yes, I updated this post in response to Pete's comment below. Thanks, Pete.)

a sea change wrapped in a sex change

Longtime readers of these pretty dumb things may have noticed a change in my writing—and not merely the fact that after a long and robust glacial age, the block has thawed and I am now writing again. No, rather I speak of the complete dearth of sex writing.

I’ve always said this was a blog with sex and not a blog of it. That distinction, however, was probably a pallid one in the eyes of my larger audience. At its peak, this blog had some pretty respectable stats; it averaged around 4,000 pages a day read by around 2,000 readers. Those readers arrived at my virtual bedpost because my blog had come to light through a cluster of connections with other sex blogs, whether big, small or anything in between. Becoming part of that larger community of—and I use this term reluctantly because I’m not fond of it—sex-positive people was pretty exciting. I felt enlivened by a groundswell of support of such like-minded, happy fucking folk.

And yet that sense of belonging didn’t come without a steaming side dish of obligation. While I’d begun writing about sex because it really was the thing taking up the biggest portion of my sludgy grey matter, I didn’t consciously make the decision to write a sex blog. I had stumbled upon the challenge of translating the purely somatic and ineffable into the completely intellectual and articulated, and I found out I was good at it. Praise can be a terrific motivator (one even better than spite, it turns out), and so I wrote more often about sex because more and more people seemed to like it. I became the editor of Tuesday’s Fleshbot sex-blog roundup. I got more readers. I found myself writing more about sex to keep them. I acquired more readers and so on. It was a circle-jerk of a sort and it felt just fine.

résumé or why i write of Dorothy Parker

Of late, I’ve found myself awake in the small, dark hours of the morning dissecting Dorothy Parker’s “Résumé.” It’s one of the very few poems I’ve memorized; the others are a couple of Hamlet’s soliloquies. I have a thing for suicidal poetry and not much else, though I can rattle off the first few lines of T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock.” I may be terribly pretentious, but I tend to the prosaic. And yet “Résumé” circles like a buzzard in my brain.

second site and beyond

So I'm also blogging over at PNN.com, the Personal News Network, whose tagline is the "global water cooler for women." I'm not entirely sure what that means. I do know the site has a close, personal relationship with Guy Kawasaki, of whom I'm quite fond. The upshot is this: I'll be duplicating most content here and there, but occasionally I'll just post something here or there, but I'll let readers know. And if you go to my site at PNN and click around on a few times a week, you can help me make money...beautiful, beautiful money. Money I can trade for goods and/or services. So there's that. Plus, I'm also getting a wider, spread-open audience just waiting to get filled with my spurting words, you know, like a water fountain, though not like a water cooler.

Did I mention I've not had a haircut since November 2007? On the other hand, I seem to have an awful lot of books, so maybe it's less my cash flow and more my ordering of priorities.

Finally, I've joined the Twitter revolution. Hell, yeah. I'm now a Tweeter. You can follow me here.

happy valentine's day, now sign a petition

I'm going to put the heavy burden of my heart-singed cynicism aside and celebrate, yeah, love. In specific, I want to celebrate the love of my married gay friends Tom and Dimitry who got hitched in sunny California before the passage of Prop 8--and whose marriage is now threatened to be nullified because of legal briefs filed by Ken Starr. If Ken Starr is successful, over 18,000 same-sex marriages will be rendered illegitimate and these couples will be forcibly divorced.

Don't let this happen. Forget the flowers and the chocolates. Just hold the hands of the person you love, look in his or her eyes and say something loving. And then watch the video and sign the petition.

The right to marry is a civil right. Do what you can to keep Ellen & Portia, Melissa & Tammy, Simon & Jonathan, Tom & Dimitry, and all those other loving humans married. Support the freedom to marry and show that love is important to you every day, in every way and for everybody.

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.