Author: Nada Gordon

The doctor looked at my tongue today and said “depleted chi.” Sigh…

Now it looks like I’ve been attacked by a giant octopus, I’ve got magnets in my ears and I smell like white flower oil.

The things we do for health…

The Bolagna Improvisations

or

Did you mean to search for: bologna 

hey have you ever wondered why bolagna is spelt

bolagna and its sopossed to be said

bolona but we say bolone its really odd

at least i think so

how bout you

I don’t like: people who take themselves too

seriously, guys who are too uptight,

irresponsibility, guys who cheat on

their lovers, bolagna sandwiches, guys …

and he shall be my Squishy! teehee….

*chews bolagna happily* *throws spork at

you*. Deviant: ~screamingdaffodils

put flowers on familys graves, and stop and have a

slaburger.i even remember when i sla burger

was a thick piece of bolagna with slaw

Geesh! –

Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring banana phone

Boop-boo-ba-doo-ba-doop! Ping pong

ping pong ping pong ping panana phone

It’s no bolagna, it aint a phony!

6 Chips/salsa, but with thin Lays orginal,

not tortilla 7 Ritz crackers with a few

cans of spray cheese 8 Carefully rolled

slices of Bolagna with spray cheese

Empty pill bottle (pills dumped in purse)

Half eaten Bolagna* (hungry shopper…

So next time you play..

with or without Mr McGee…

Think of me…naked..eating a

bolagna sandwich,

and spanking your mom….

What’s flarf, anyway?

Read Jordan’s article!

I agree, Jordan, that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference, if only because love and hate are linked by the extent of their passion.

There is a key difference, though, in that you want to destroy or hurt someone you hate, but you want to delight and take care of someone you love.

I suppose this is merely platitudinous.

OK, I’m answering the same set of questions that Josh answered on his blog.

______________________________

Hello Paul,

I think it’s great that you are planning to write such an article for Poets and Writers. I very strongly suggest that you make contact with Nick Piombino (of http://nickpiombino.blogspot.com, or fait accompli) before you start writing. He has emerged as the foremost theorist of po-bloggers yet. He’s also one of the most interesting blog-practitioners.

I was interested in your questions about blogging, because to tell you the truth, I ask myself those questions about blogging nearly every day. And nearly every day I come up with different answers. By extension, I ask myself the same questions about writing in general and also about living — but that of course is a road too long and involved to take here, in this comments box.

You ask: “What good is it?”

Questions of ultimate value are lost on me. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not that my blog has caused me to generate some writing that I might otherwise have done. But in fact, it has. I’m not sure that blogging has been “good” for my writing. I’m not sure what writing, how much or what kind, I would have done had I not started a blog. But I will say this: I am a deeply impatient person. Blogs offer a kind of (admittedly limited) instant gratification in that I can make the writing public instantly. Whether anyone actually reads it or not is another matter.

What do you get out of it?

Mainly, it is amusing. It is also a place where I can engage with the notions (and obsessions) that are swimming around in my consciousness, the events in the world, and other people in a space that is not too strictly defined, not vetted by any gatekeepers, either peers or authorities, and that is capacious enough to be as ridiculous and trivial as it is grave and serious.

Has it changed your ideas about writing?

No.

What’s weird about it?

I often feel that I am talking to myself (the blog’s motto for a while was “like shouting into a cistern!”), that I am not really part of a community here. I don’t think that’s objectively true, but rather a projection of a deeper sense of disconnection from others (or from “pure being”?) that is particularly easy to feel in a virtual environment.

The cyberworld has always been for me the site of both tremendous emotional gratification as well as neurosis; computers themselves have been both stimulating and injurious. There’s lots that’s weird about having a blog — not least the appearance of creepy anonymous commenters or out-of-nowhere flame wars.

In general, though, I think blogging is more fun than it is weird. And I read other people’s blogs *avidly*.

What misgivings do you have?

I wish I had waited to become a blogger until data entry gets to the point where we don’t actually have to type but can just think our thoughts onto the screen.

I have some misgivings that I don’t actually spend more time on my blog, making it into a real work of art and attentiveness instead of what I like to call a “magpie space” — but really this is all I have energy for.

Why do it?

I initially became a blogger because just about all poetry bloggers at the time were men. That didn’t seem right. I often disagree(d) with their poetics and opinions, and wanted my own territory where I could do so publicly, as well as articulate my own sensibilities.

I’m thrilled to see that now the poetry blogging world is fairly TEEMING with brilliant women.

May it continue to expand….

Happy birthday Douglas!

NO IDEAS BUT IN CAKE

After duplicitousness, I think obsequiousness is my least favorite personality trait.

How’s the new Bjork? Is it as amazing as the hype makes it sound?

I love her voice and persona. I was never crazy about the techno stuff.

Can anyone name a religion that can not in some way be said to be “obstinate”?

I’m trying to write some responses to these questions about women’s writing.

These are only a draft. I’m still thinking.

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1.In your opinion, have women writers responded in any

discernibly patterned way to the cultural changes women have

experienced as a population group since the beginning of the

Twentieth Century? If so, has this been a

conscious/deliberate response?

If a pattern is not discernible, can it be said to exist?

The passive voice’s implicit in “discernible,” and twice as insidious.

Is not the key question “discernible to whom?” and for what reason or with what motivation?

Patterns are discernible in everything. That’s the wonder of the universe! Brink me some ink and a fresh sheet of paper.

A bra that is discernibly patterned will show right through a thin blouse.

The pattern of vulnerable cells that make up a breast, a pregnant bulge, a group of grapes — or a green pepper from the back, hunching over and crumpling for the camera…

Run! Quick! Get me my spirograph!

More women are writing more and more publicly. That’s true.

No woman writing now writes as well as the women writers of the 19th century — Elizabeth Barrett Browning and George Eliot to name two. It’s not our fault but the fault of the continuing transformation of our culture into something mainly visual and bliplike. We just can’t concentrate.

Now we are doomed to a lot of creative recyclings and conceptual explorations, for the time being.

Writing is always a response and always — even when “automatic” — conscious and deliberate. So in that sense the patterns we choose to notice in women’s writing are conscious and deliberate and forms of response.

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2.As a women writer, how do you define contemporary

womanhood? How does your interpretation of it, or its

challenges and rewards, reveal itself in your writings

and/or in your interpretation of other women writers’ work?

“Contemporary Womanhood” (sounds like the name of a magazine or a store) is a highly culturally specific phenom.

How I define it doesn’t matter.

It keeps getting defined for us by those-who-empower-themselves-by-defining (hating them).

I feel sorry for women in America, although we arguably “have it better” than women in trad cultures. Not because we have so many choices; that is arguably a good thing. Rather it’s because “contempo-wo-hood” is just as fetishized as the old kind of womanhood, but harsher, busier, and vapidly hedonistic. A svelte oiled woman’s eyes glaze over, she sucks a piece of her frosty hair and a hunk licks her diamond — who cares?

In key ways we are more trivial. As we lose our roles as “sacred reproducers” (to be distinguished from “reproducers for the state”) we become less profound, not as writers but as biological entities in the looping chains of being. But perhaps I speak only for myself. I don’t think I want to be a mother….

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3.How would you define “innovative” writing?

Again, my definition of “innovative” doesn’t matter. Glad to see the scary quotes.

In literature now (by which I mean the pomo — frequently misread as porno — period) anything can only be “innovative” in the context of a particular reader’s or writer’s development and exigencies.

“Innovative” is a branding term like new and improved. It helps define a target market. It is characterized by a set of instantly recognizable textual effects — brand qualities — especially forms of dislocation and disjunctiveness. It’s useful as a handle for distinguishing it from the writing that is branded “mainstream” and that is inherently and (OK, I’ll through in an almost for good measure) invariably bad bad bad, evilly banal, and boring.

However, there’s nothing inherently interesting about “innovation ” or “innovative techniques.” It’s just a category, formed partly by market forces and partly by social networks.

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4.Do you believe that a “feminine rhythm” exists? Or

feminine sounds? Or feminine forms? Etc.? Why or why not?

A feminine rhythm most certainly exists, but it isn’t necessarily connected to prosody. It’s connected to menstruation.

I write the most intensely during the two or three days my period is coming on.

There is a branded “feminine rhythm,” for sure. It’s vague and floaty, Faux-elegant sometimes and wispily sensitive. I don’t feel so friendly to this kind of rhythm. Mannerism can be lovely and so even can affectation, but the kind of “feminine rhythm” to which I’m referring is just lame. It lacks DECISIVE PUNCH and NECESSARY (to me) AESTHETIC VIOLENCE. I don’t want to give any examples because there are many many writers (women as well as men) who aim for just such an effect, and I have nothing against them personally except that, well, they form a certain network of social approval from which I find myself (and this is my own fault, I admit) excluded — maybe better to say I exclude myself.

Looking for rhythms that are passionate, silly, angry, wise, halting, whirling, etc. They’re not gendered.

Feminine sounds — yes, of course: vowels. And “L”… and “M.”

Feminine forms: see discernible patterns. There are so many vulvas in woodgrain! Check it out!

***************************************

5.How do you feel that the theory of essentialism, the idea

that women’s writing always reflects some essential

characteristics of the population group, impacts the thesis

that women writing unconventionally may be doing so for

their own purposes?

I don’t know how a theory or idea can impact a thesis.

As an English teacher I have a lot of trouble with this question. Sentence logic! (whistle blows)

First of all, it seems that there are two questions sandwiched here.

First, do women writing unconventionally do so for their own purposes?

Unquestionably they do. Why else would someone write — unless they were writing propaganda or ad copy — and in that case why would they write unconventionally?

(A subquestion here is whether women who write “innovatively” really are writing unconventionally.)

And how does writing for one’s own purpose obviate the possibility that some kind of biologically essential qualities might HAVE AN IMPACT ON the kind of writing that a writer does?

I don’t have empirical evidence to argue for or against essentialism. Common sense might help me to argue for (what might be) “essentialist” tendencies in many of us.

The problem with essentialism is of course that it relies on CATEGORIES. Categories are problematic as they are defined by “those-who-empower-themselves-by-defining” (and categorizing). I don’t have a big problem with, for example, the notion that gender is a continuum rather than strictly defined as two distinct groups, “males” and “females.” I have a little bit of a problem with the idea that “gender” is only a social phenomenon, as most of us fall pretty clearly (and empirically) on either side of the continuum. The fact, though, that most of us have as regulatory agents inside us ALL of the possible hormones, argues pretty strongly for the continuum idea. It’s certainly possible for a woman who is externally extremely feminine to have a higher level of testosterone than an average guy. I’m not sure what essentialism would mean given such facts.

I’m not sure either how we would isolate — scientifically — specifically what effects in writing have their genesis in “essential” female qualities and what effects have their genesis in “socialized” female qualities. Deborah Tannen’s work in this area is fascinating, but it still tells us very little about whether those qualities started in the hen or the egg that hatched her. Why do we need to know this, anyway? Why do we keep talking about this?

About one thing I feel very sure: “essentialism” should not be used as a weapon of discrimination, unless it can somehow prevent someone, usually a woman, from suffering undue pain or violence.

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6.Who, in your opinion, are the leading contemporary women

writers in so far as “innovation” and “cultural expression”

come into play? Why?

Ecch. What an awful question. Really ladies, you should know better than to stoop to such hegemonic popularity contests.

If I reel off the names of the women in power (regardless of whether or not their writing has meant a lot to or moved me), it will do nothing but give them more of the publicity I’m sure many of your responders are already giving them. The fact is that the literary world, now more than ever, is a great machine of social networks and personal ambitions. I don’t exempt myself from this machine, but it doesn’t mean I want to set down here some cartography of spheres of influence. I hate that.

Of course, you can detect here that I am very very angry and resentful that I haven’t attained such status.

(insert smiley)

(makes a little peace sign)

(feminine wiles)

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