this is for the typewriter-lovers out there---

neat little graphic from Gazette v.XIX n.3 1973

speaking of The Woman in the Body...

no, I haven't  actually read any further in the book mentioned in the previous entry--I keep checking out further fascinating monographs, or randomly taking bad cell-phone pictures of things that catch my eye as I shift great numbers of books on tall shelves in order to insure that there are no books on the lowest shelves, and that the distribution of books is equitable. I absolutely adore equitability.

At any rate, today I was shifting row upon row of PNs. And I opened up, at random --- well, I left the citation behind but it was the July/August 1980 Film Comment with Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance on the cover. But I hadn't yet seen the cover when I, standing on a platform ladder, on a whim opened to:

R to L: Kitten Natividad and that country band from The Blues Brothers

 

I was eleven years old in 1980. And this does seem to grasp at a bit of that gossamer zeitgeist that permeated that confusing---yet simpler? I doubt it, actually---time.

a book from storage. it is red.

And its title is The Woman in the Body and its author is Emily Martin. Oh and I see that it is subtitled A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Published in 1987 (the year I graduated high school). The title must have caught my eye as I searched for storage requests. I could be very happy left alone for hours in Offsite Storage: I want to read it all, or at least peruse most of it.

This book has an--is it epigram or epigraph? Y'd think with a fucking Masters Degree in Publishing I would remember such distinctions (about that: I guess I burnt myself out on the subject. The same way that, back when I was a Plant Lady taking care of rental tropical plants, after a while I sadistically allowed my own houseplants, which once had made me so proud, to die. Or when I worked in the record stores--I didn't want to listen to music on the drive home. You know?) by Adrienne Rich from Of Woman Born to wit:

I know no woman--virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate--whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress, or a scanner of brain waves--for whom her body is not a fundamental problem: its clouded meaning, its fertility, its desire, its so-called frigidity, its bloody speech, its silences, its changes and mutilations, its rapes and ripenings. There is for the first time today a possibility of converting our physicality into both knowledge and power.

Well, all righty then. I like knowledge and power! I think. I know I like knowledge. I wonder if Adrienne Rich had children? Well easy enough to check. By the way, Ms. Rich, I think, with her poem "Living in Sin"

She thought the studio would keep itself.

No dust upon the furniture of love

implanted in rural, pre-pubescent (I was eleven when I first read it) me a desire to live in sin despite the relentless milkman. But anyway. I see that she bore three sons. I myself am childless and determined to remain that way--at least as regards bearing children. But back to the book. What might I learn from this book? I'm not going to read it cover to cover, I am sure.

 ::peruses chapter titles::

 oh "The Familiar and the Exotic" eh? "Medical Metaphors...: Menstruation and Menopause" now there's a mouthful..."Premenstrual Syndrome, Work Discipline, and Anger" for some reason sounds positively feudal to me...well all right I will probably find bits and bobs of this to be interesting. I do miss my sociology studies.

Thank you for joining me during this episode of "what's on my desk"---brought to you by almond bubble tea with tapioca from The Chit Chat in PDX OR.

all the books on my desk

-Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy.

This is a Summit book--it came to me from Tesc Library at Evergreen State College up around Olympia. Short stories. In much the same way that I love tiny cookies and individualized desserts, I love short stories. So perfect. I'm impressed with these. I am on page 160 of 219--three stories to go. I notice that this book, which is due on June 22nd, is dedicated to Geoffrey Wolff. I am more familiar with the work of his brother Tobias--oh how I admire his work. And also his reading-aloud skills. His is one of my favorite episodes of The New Yorker Fiction Podcast with New Yorker fiction editor Debra Triesman.

I can't remember why I ordered this book. just searching around in the database, I guess. Perhaps I have recetly heard her  name mentioned amongst the Portland writers I try to keep up with. Will try to keep up with. I am determined to submit something somewhere before the end of may. Why else did I disrupt everything--everything--about my former life, if not to write? And, by extension, fuckin' present it to a readership.

Like I'm just about to do with this teensy-weensy post.

300 words at a time.

 So I have been writing on
typetrigger

as xrayiris. It would please me to no end to be read by YOU.

Someday These Posts Won't Be So Crudely Done

Coronet. The Magazine That Makes You *Wonder*

The word obscured by the sticker? Love.

What Games Did They Like To Play?

Add caption

Blurry and Off-Centered Cell-phone Photographs of Things I See While At Work

This is a detail of the frontispiece to Elliot West's

Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Far Western Frontier