I like dogs Big dogs Little dogs Fat dogs Doggy dogs Old dogs Puppy dogs I like dogs A dog that is barking over the hill A dog that is dreaming very still A dog that is running wherever he will I like dogs.
*I prefer big dogs, always have, and, let me be honest, I’m not crazy about felines, at all. Oh well. Diego almost looks small in this picture, which enchants me – he is anything but, was just now head-butting me because he wants to play, which…here I go!
*a poem by Nâzim Hikmet, a Turkish writer, a deeply political writer, whose work I had never heard of before, who spent much of his adult in jail due to his political beliefs. How lucky are we to have that first amendment, and – whatever our challenges, and they are many – I for one am grateful.
It’s 1962 March 28th
I’m sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
night is falling
I never knew I liked
night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain
I don’t like
comparing nightfall to a tired bird
I didn’t know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn’t worked the earth love it
I’ve never worked the earth
it must be my only Platonic love
and here I’ve loved rivers all this time
whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills
European hills crowned with chateaus
or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see
I know you can’t wash in the same river even once
I know the river will bring new lights you’ll never see
I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long as a crow
I know this has troubled people before
and will trouble those after me
I know all this has been said a thousand times before
and will be said after me
I didn’t know I loved the sky
cloudy or clear
the blue vault Andrei studied on his back at Borodino
in prison I translated both volumes of War and Peace into Turkish
I hear voices
not from the blue vault but from the yard
the guards are beating someone again
I didn’t know I loved trees
bare beeches near Moscow in Peredelkino
they come upon me in winter noble and modest
beeches are Russian the way poplars are Turkish
“the poplars of Izmir
losing their leaves. . .
they call me The Knife. . .
lover like a young tree. . .
I blow stately mansions sky-high”
in the Ilgaz woods in 1920 I tied an embroidered linen handkerchief
to a pine bough for luck
I never knew I loved roads
even the asphalt kind
Vera’s behind the wheel we’re driving from Moscow to the Crimea
Koktebele
formerly “Goktepé ili” in Turkish
the two of us inside a closed box
the world flows past on both sides distant and mute
I was never so close to anyone in my life
bandits stopped me on the red road between Bolu and Geredé
when I was eighteen
apart from my life I didn’t have anything in the wagon they could take
and at eighteen our lives are what we value least
I’ve written this somewhere before
wading through a dark muddy street I’m going to the shadow play
Ramazan night
a paper lantern leading the way
maybe nothing like this ever happened
maybe I read it somewhere an eight-year-old boy
going to the shadow play
Ramazan night in Istanbul holding his grandfather’s hand
his grandfather has on a fez and is wearing the fur coat
with a sable collar over his robe
and there’s a lantern in the servant’s hand
and I can’t contain myself for joy
flowers come to mind for some reason
poppies cactuses jonquils
in the jonquil garden in Kadikoy Istanbul I kissed Marika
fresh almonds on her breath
I was seventeen
my heart on a swing touched the sky
I didn’t know I loved flowers
friends sent me three red carnations in prison
I just remembered the stars
I love them too
whether I’m floored watching them from below
or whether I’m flying at their side
I have some questions for the cosmonauts
were the stars much bigger
did they look like huge jewels on black velvet
or apricots on orange
did you feel proud to get closer to the stars
I saw color photos of the cosmos in Ogonek magazine now don’t
be upset comrades but nonfigurative shall we say or abstract
well some of them looked just like such paintings which is to
say they were terribly figurative and concrete
my heart was in my mouth looking at them
they are our endless desire to grasp things
seeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad
I never knew I loved the cosmos
snow flashes in front of my eyes
both heavy wet steady snow and the dry whirling kind
I didn’t know I liked snow
I never knew I loved the sun
even when setting cherry-red as now
in Istanbul too it sometimes sets in postcard colors
but you aren’t about to paint it that way
I didn’t know I loved the sea
except the Sea of Azov
or how much
I didn’t know I loved clouds
whether I’m under or up above them
whether they look like giants or shaggy white beasts
moonlight the falsest the most languid the most petit-bourgeois
strikes me
I like it
I didn’t know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my
heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop
and takes off for uncharted countries I didn’t know I loved
rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting
by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
is it because I lit my sixth cigarette
one alone could kill me
is it because I’m half dead from thinking about someone back in Moscow
her hair straw-blond eyelashes blue
the train plunges on through the pitch-black night
I never knew I liked the night pitch-black
sparks fly from the engine
I didn’t know I loved sparks
I didn’t know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty
to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train
watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return
*this is my newspaper column, published March 16th for Women’s History Month, reprinted here for your reading pleasure…
My mother was one of the smartest, best read humans I have ever known. She taught Latin, loved Cicero, knew French and a smattering of both German and Greek, quoted Caesar at dinner (the Roman Emperor, not Sid or the pizza-pizza squirt), and had memorized reams of poetry, which – even when I was a kid – she retained in her capacious noggin. Typical mid-century mom? Um, not really. One thing my brilliant mother was not, however, despite raising three daughters: a feminist.
My mom was complicated (aren’t we all). She believed in the power of education, expecting her daughters to go to college, as she did her son. While his choices, however, were unlimited, for her daughters there were three professions she believed were suitable: teacher, nurse and – perhaps not a profession, but rather a calling – nun. My older sister became a teacher, my young sister became a nurse, and I, well I took the road less traveled by, which didn’t lead anywhere even close to a convent.
My mother denied herself opportunities and quashed dreams she longed for because she felt it wasn’t ‘her place’ to get those desires met. Her role, she believed, was to support her primary bread-winner husband, raise their children, and, while teaching part-time, volunteer in various civic organizations overwhelmingly made up of other women, ninety-eight percent of whom were also married with children.
The thing is, or was, she was bored out of her mind, and just a tad resentful, if by tad you understand I mean a lot. Funny thing is, my dad would’ve loved not working so hard, and supported her furthering her career in education, but that choice was not in her personal lexicon. She wanted to emulate her favorite sister-in-law Eleanor (mom had seven brothers, so there were, ultimately, eleven sisters-in-law). Eleanor Jewell (even her name was perfect!), was the ideal mother to seven children, the perfect help-meet to my mom’s beloved older brother, Bob. Uncle Bob was an expert on Russia, had been in the CIA, and was, for many years, a professor at Indiana U., enjoying an academic career for which my mother was, temperamentally, intellectually, and in every other way, ideally suited. Parenting? Domestic engineering? Not so much. Bottom line: Dotty wasn’t like Eleanor, Dotty was like her brother, Bob.
Dotty was also determined to follow the narrow road she set out for herself, despite her gifts and the increasing amount of choices opening up for women during her lifetime, including for her daughters. One of the many things she and I clashed about was what she considered my unladylike interest in boys and sports. I was also unrepentantly independent, and ambitious about my future. Why would I not be? It didn’t help that my mother’s idea of ladylike essentially meant spending my teens and twenties sequestered in my room reading Emily Post while keeping my knees super-glued together, waiting for Prince Charming to show up. Doesn’t that sound like fun? No, not to me, either.
Feminism is grounded in the idea, the principle, the foundational belief in the equality of all human beings, regardless of gender, of race, of sexuality, of class, or of religion, including a lack thereof. Simple pimple. The women in my mother friends’ group were all smart, funny, capable, and (to quote Archie Bunker) stifled. Could these women – Edna, Betty, Carolyn, Marian, Trudy, Ruth, etc. – have run the world? You bet. And, in many ways, they did – within well-defined, conventional limits. Convent, conventional: words with common roots in Latin.
At its core, feminism is humanism, a humanism that seeks to elevate women, men, all people, opening doors to opportunity and choice – free, unfettered choice – sparking human potential without judgement, without resistance, without holding anyone back because of how they look, dress, or love, or what body parts they do or do not have. And, this month (and every month in my house), we celebrate what historic and personal progress has been made and won by and for women and girls. Yay.
My mother adored my dad, and wanted to give him the children and life he wanted, but she left herself too much, too often out of the equation. She was a master educator who deeply loved teaching, inspiring many of her students to go into education themselves. I wish she had fought for herself, for her dreams, because they, and she, mattered.
Life has meaning for many reasons; each individual must find purpose and happiness for themselves. Very often that is found in serving – and loving – others, but loyalty to oneself, to one’s own goals, well, those have meaning, too.
I casually say, “Who in your friend group has had sex?”
“Lost their virginity? Oh. I’m not sure? I don’t think very many, if not any.”
I say, “You know the first time hurts.”
My niece, “Right, you said that your first time guy hurt.”
I said, “No, it physically hurt and yes, good memory. I was sad because he left after he got me to have sex for the first time.”
Yes. It was Mark-O West (*this name has been changed ). I was a cook for a family one summer vacation; he was living in the town. I don’t remember how we met, but he seemed to be able to sniff out virgins. He was that guy. I know now that he was that guy because as it turns out, he did it to someone else that summer. He was charming and attentive to me, to someone who didn’t know anyone else. He would visit after work. I was flattered that he would arrive, unannounced at my bedroom door. This was way before texting, cell phones, all of it.
I was somewhere where I knew no one but the people I was cooking diet cakes and fresh veggies, swordfish for…
The family loaned me a silver blue soft top Mustang 1962 coupe with the large steering wheel worthy of a necker’s knob. It – the car – was part of a collection from the seven-car garage that the boss’s husband proudly showed me on my first day. He was really into his cars. He was really into his cars and talking about people, conversations that always included something about their penis or masturbation or popping a cherry, or something I didn’t want to hear about, but that he would say to me. Yes, he was that guy, the creepy boss husband.
Was that comment for me? Was he interested in me? I never got that feeling. It always sounded more like it was for a boy, not me. I didn’t have the hair on the back of my neck go up with him, but Mark-O, oh yes. He made me nervous. He would say, “No one who goes to college is a virgin,” or, “they shouldn’t be.” He knew because he was in college. I was the eldest of my siblings. My sisters were much younger. Who could I ask? I didn’t dare. I didn’t know. I had only heard about sex up close. I heard heavy breathing at a house where a pile of us spent the night after the prom. I was on the floor in a room feigning sleep, I was done with the stupid inane conversation downstairs, and all of a sudden two people burst in the room looking for a place, I hadn’t even taken the bed. I was on the floor, head away from the door. I was a good pretender. Yet the whole thing: movement, squeaking of the bed back and forth, laughing, talking, grunting, sleeping, snoring – I heard the whole thing. Ugh. And here I was now being pestered by this guy that seemed so excited by me. I was being courted. I liked the attention. I was sixteen. This might be the one, the new one, the BOYFRIEND. He was Mark-O West. Everyone knew him in town. I even think my boss introduced us when she took me into town the first day to look around, and “learn the ropes”. There he was at the supermarket somewhere in town. I think she even offered to have him go on a sail or motorboat ride.
And so it began. He would come over as I was washing the last dish, the last pot, and then we would walk? Or something that led to kissing that led to doing everything you do but kiss. Which led Mark-O to ask every day about my virginity, to remind me about college, that no one there is a virgin, that now was the time. He had less than 2 months, maybe a month, to succeed, maybe. He didn’t even arrive when I was doing dishes, but when I was already in the servants’ cabin behind the house, in my own room and bathroom disconnected from the house – did he knock on the door? Was I in bed reading? Is that how it started?
Was I in bed reading and he knocked, and came and sat in the room? Ugh. I think that’s where it started.
It ended on a bedspread in the garden under a full moon, which was supposed to be romantic but there were so many bugs and the moonlight was so bright that it didn’t really feel romantic. It was more like a spotlight. We pressed on but the mosquitos were fierce. His penis was way too big, it hurt. It hurt so much and then there was
Goo everywhere in the dark on the bedspread under the moonlight. It was supposed to be so romantic and yet when I finally went to bed, Mark-O long gone – the between my legs hurt.
I shoved the bedspread into the washing machine, only for it to be found by the boss’s kid, younger than me, who cried out, “Eewwwww, blood on a bedspread? What happened here?” And then I was really embarrassed. I didn’t realize the blood had seeped out and onto the bedspread or maybe I did and I stuffed it into the washing machine hoping to get it to disappear not realizing I needed to wash it. So much embarrassment.
And he was gone. After that night in early August, he wouldn’t return my calls. I even went to where he lived and he wasn’t there or he was nonchalant, non-committal. It was over. The conquest done.
When I got to college for the first time and bumped into a girl/woman – someone I sort of knew who also had been in that town, and I got to talking to her about my summer and I mentioned and this guy and what a dick he was for leaving and she looked at me incredulously, “What? Me too!” The whole story. He did the same thing to her at the same time. What the hell. She and I plotted to go back to that town and spray paint his name and ‘Is A Rapist’ on the wall near the supermarket. We talked about it every time I saw her on campus but we never did it, dammit!
*Remember that every time a man commits a violent act it only takes one or two steps to figure out how it’s a woman’s fault, and that these dance steps are widely known and practiced and quite a bit of fun. There are things men do that are the fault of women who are too sexy, and other things men do that are the fault of women who are not sexy enough, but women only come in those two flavors: not enough, too much, and it is the fate of heterosexual men to endure this affliction. Wives are responsible for their husbands, especially if their husbands are supremely powerful and terrifying figures leading double lives and accountable to no one. But women are now also in the workforce, where they have so many opportunities to be responsible for other men as well. – Rebecca Solnit
During this ‘Women’s History Month’ in the U.S. it’s essential that we remember this staggering fact: almost three women are killed by an intimate partner/ex/current husband etc. in this country on a daily basis, and that of all femicides in the U.S. annually, ninety-two percent of women knew their killer based on data from 2018.
Recently a comedian I follow on social media asked what women want men to stop doing most, and I responded Killing Us. At least no one clapped back (as has happened in the past) commenting on my being over-dramatic or with the classic Not All Men. Men commit 90% of all violence world-wide. When women kill men it is overwhelmingly done as a result of their acting in self-defense; of all homicides committed where the victims are male, only 5% are committee by women. So, basically, men kill men and women (with 30% of male on male homicides committed by strangers) all the fucking time, every fucking day, and a helluva lot more than women kill men, or women or children… or animals, for that matter.
Men need to do better and it is not women’s job to make them do or be better. Nor is it women’s fault – including their moms (so tempting to blame mom) – when men fuck up. Holding men accountable in a patriarchy is not easy, yet – it can be done. Good LAWD it feels like a Sisyphean task at best, because it is – but – to save lives, to make a better world, it must be done.
Here’s the rest of the essay excerpted above from Solnit in 2017, which I copy and paste here because – still true. And because if I hear one more person blame RBG – or any other liberal or progressive woman for the fall of Roe and the current mess surrounding IVF and etc., I will scream. Donald Turnip, Sam Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Mitch McConnell, Amy Coney-Barrett and all the rest of the crew of woman-haters – aided and abetted by conservative creeps in Mississippi – overturned Roe. The fuckers.
Harvey Weinstein is Hillary Clinton’s fault, we have learned from many sources. So is eczema and the Civil War and the fact that your child refuses to learn to tie shoelaces and sticks to Velcro shoes. The hairs and stuff that get caught in the Velcro are also Hillary Clinton’s fault, and she could have passed legislation against them if she cared instead of being uncaring. It is also the soon-to-be-divorced Mrs. Weinstein’s fault that her husband is an alleged rapist, except that it is Hillary Clinton’s fault, except that it is the fault of the victims for choosing to be small, young female victims looking for work at the outset of their cinematic careers instead of being Matt Damon, a choice open to us all.
Why are you not Matt Damon yourself? This is your fault. Perhaps you could also choose to be Jason Bourne, which would guarantee your safety every time? Take it from me: the Bourne option. After all I have read in Wikipedia that Bourne these days is “isolating himself from the world and making a living by taking part in savage, bareknuckle fighting bouts,” which is what everyone should have done if they saw Harvey Weinstein rising like a great scary potato over the horizon. It appears that Clinton was in Washington pushing to get the Children’s Health Insurance Program reauthorized while the reports broke about Weinstein’s alleged creepitude, but it’s her fault if she can’t multitask. Likewise it is the fault of young actresses for not speaking just because they were threatened by a terrifying bully, and it’s their fault that if they spoke up no one would have believed them, and of course you can now blame them for what happened, because in Shakespeare’s day there were no actresses, but these women insisted on entering the field, where there were men, and even entering the production facility, where there was this man.
Remember that every time a man commits a violent act it only takes one or two steps to figure out how it’s a woman’s fault, and that these dance steps are widely known and practiced and quite a bit of fun. There are things men do that are the fault of women who are too sexy, and other things men do that are the fault of women who are not sexy enough, but women only come in those two flavors: not enough, too much, and it is the fate of heterosexual men to endure this affliction. Wives are responsible for their husbands, especially if their husbands are supremely powerful and terrifying figures leading double lives and accountable to no one. But women are now also in the workforce, where they have so many opportunities to be responsible for other men as well.
It is Anita Hill’s fault that Clarence Thomas is a creep, and it’s also her fault that he’s on the Supreme Court, and it’s her fault she didn’t speak up about his sexual harassment, and also her fault that she did speak up about it, ruffling important waters when men were trying to fly-fish them, as women do when men try. To fly-fish that is, and the trout that are not biting are the fault of the woman who did not smile at you on the bus this morning, though it is a gospel truth that lady strangers owe you smiles. If we study up, it may be possible to figure out which parts of everything are Anita Hill’s fault. Mary Todd Lincoln: perhaps her faults linger on, and it would be fun to blame her for something, and why did Michelle Obama choose to exercise her right to bare arms? Perhaps that makes her responsible for some mass shootings, which tend to be carried out by men, but not their fault. Someone made them do it, and every time a man does something awful we can all pause for a moment of respectful silence while we figure out who to blame.
It is possible, as I study the situation, that I personally am responsible for the sack of Rome and for Attila the Hun and the Black Death (I wore a lot of black back in the day, still do), but more research is needed. It may also be that my friends Conchita and Amy are responsible for ebola and the holes in the socks of our great men that so afflict their heels when they would rather be thinking of how to serve our fatherland. If I were a man perhaps I would understand why a man just explained to me that Trump is Clinton’s fault and not be baffled about why no one ever said in my hearing that Bush II was Al Gore’s and then John Kerry’s fault or Ronald Reagan was Jimmy Carter’s fault for that matter.
Evidently it is the fault of Hillary Clinton that there is Donald Trump, and it was wrong of her to put Harvey Weinstein’s donation to work on to her attempt to beat Trump and protect reproductive rights and stuff, instead of donating the money to a cause that benefited women, and it’s her fault that a lot of Americans wanted to vote for, as Laurie Penny put it, the Hog-Emperor of Rape Culture who hunted her onstage in the second debate like Sherman going after Atlanta, only with snorting. After all the Civil War was her fault.
I have spoken. Which I do. Which is one of my faults; I am crafting an apology for that out of dynamite and backhoes which will be ready presently.
