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.