“The narrator throughout is also very keen to highlight the pleasures she derives from femininity and how much it defines her identity, especially in “Does Not Suffice.” The narrator in “Does Not Suffice” emphasizes her possession of the feminine garments over and over again (“I will pack up my high-heeled shoes…”). The clothes are all hers and she uses them to help her cope with her loss and to remind the person she loved “how easy [she] was not.” Instead of the clothes dehumanizing her, they “re-humanize” her. To the narrator of Have One on Me, femininity does not automatically translate into possession and loss of self and violence. Femininity is very capable of affirming her humanity. But throughout Have One On Me such destruction is always disastrously close. Can femininity ever have one meaning? One type of consequence?”
—Melissa K. Marturano, via allthebirds
May 2012
72 posts
Play
One of my very best and dearest friends has a tumblr! I was so excited about it that I had to write about it… on tumblr. Jamie and I met at university. She lived at one end of our staircase and I lived at the other. I’m still not entirely unconvinced that magic didn’t play a role in the making of our little neighbourhood there. I don’t think they could have found a group of people more suited to each other. Our residence building was a big cement castle, with secret passages to inner courtyards and a big open common space that literally disappeared into the river running past its feet (I used to imagine the mermaids and monsters that lived there while reciting vocabulary and verbs in my morning Latin classes).
In second year, we moved into a house on Water Street, around the corner from a riverfront park. I lived in a small room with exposed bricks. I painted my bed celery green and tried desperately to grow a little herb garden on my windowsill. Jamie lived in the room next door, a tiny blue thing nearly filled by her antique iron bed. She had a porthole window and a skylight. Our room was off the kitchen, with a small brick hallway and fire escape that we used to climb onto the roof at night to look at the stars. Jamie was the first person I ever got properly drunk with on midnight margaritas and blueberry (I think it was blueberry) wine.
For the next two years, we lived in a place called Charlotte Towers with a little cat called Esme. In my revisions and memories of it, we actually lived in a tower. In actual fact, it was just a high rise apartment building that looked out over downtown. I filled that apartment with the Decemberists (non-stop) and experimented in our tiny kitchen with making my own pasta and baking bread in flower pots. We descended from our tower, down the spiral staircase, nearly every night (maybe an exaggeration…. at least during times of stress) to stock provisions in the form of Doritos and diet coke (or V8, in Jamie’s case).
When school was finished, and we were slowly moving our collections and quilts and cats and things out of that apartment, I remember Jamie’s mom saying something along the lines of, “I hope you girls stay in touch.” The thought never really occured to me, that people could come into and then go out of your life. I’ve learned, since then, that it happens all the time.
It’s been five years since we moved out of that apartment (five? I think five) and we have kept in touch. Jamie’s become one of the most important people in my life. We get together about twice a year with another friend in our university town. We hole ourselves up in a small, mildly seedy hotel and spend the evenings talking and reading and writing and getting excited about each other’s lives. It’s been difficult for me to see this in myself this year, but looking back at where we were and where we are I appreciate the fact that my friends have truly become incredible, beautiful, interesting and inspiring people. They always were, of course, but they keep getting better and better.
Jamie is a lover of books and words and the woods and animals and gardens and unicorns and her horses and vegan food and pretty well all the good things that exist in the world. She is the most imaginative and kind hearted person I know.
And now I can follow her every move on tumblr!
“…But there’s also so many things that are OK and good that sometimes it makes you crumple over with being alive. We are allowed such an insane depth of beauty and enjoyment in this lifetime. It’s what my dad talks about sometimes. He says the only way that he knows there’s a God is that there’s so much gratuitous joy in this life. And that’s his only proof. There’s so many joys that do not assist in the propagation of the race or self-preservation. There’s no point whatsoever. They are so excessively, mind-bogglingly joy-producing that they distract from the very functions that are supposed to promote human life. They can leave you stupefied, monastic, not productive in any way, shape or form. And those joys are there and they are unflagging and they are ever-growing.”
—
Joanna Newsom, Nearer the Heart of Things (aka the best JNew interview you will ever read)
Perfect
(via littlewillowcabin)
Fair warning: I am writing because I am procrastinating and this post will, therefore, be little more than an emptying of my mind.
Yesterday I went on a wonderful picnic with a friend from the bookstore. We sat by the lake and watched little goose babies learning how to dive under water. Silly llittle things. It was pretty ideal, scrunched up on the bench by the water, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and crunching on apples.
Afterwards, I got to thinking how much good news I had to share and how great it felt to be sharing it with my friend for the first time. A lot of the news I shared was stuff that I hadn’t posted on facebook (yeah, I’m overanalyzing facebook again), so until I personally tell people about it, they don’t really know. That makes me feel strangely powerful.
I’m getting incredibly worked up about the education tag and the response to recent posts about unschooling and I just… can’t.
