Hard-core Divas Hit the Stone: Sharon, Gertrude, Lynn

Camelia Elias, Roskilde University

I have recently attended a conference in Reims on the interesting topic The Cultural Kernel. On popular demand, for those that can't wait for the paper to come out in Imaginaires, here's a preview. This pre-publication is also in response to Stuart Noble's call for papers dealing with American women writers.

My essay takes its point of departure in contemporary poet Lynn Emanuel’s work. Emanuel’s poetry is engaged in making cultural statements which are often based on a link between portrayal and ideas – character portrayal, object portrayal, and depictions of places and personalities from Gertrude Stein to Sharon Stone. I argue that Emanuel’s poems establish themselves as cultural texts, and as such, as discourses that address several levels of reality: 1) in order for the poems to work communicatively, they have to put into operation and activate the author’s and reader’s cultural awareness; 2) in order for the poems to make themselves intelligible, relevant, and aesthetic, (a tall order for any text) they have to be involved in a deliberate reworking of cultural elements. We never experience culture as something complete or at a distance. The cultural kernel is not just an object that is in the poems, but can be thought of as more of a process of collaboration between the author, poems, and the reader. These levels show the extent to which the author’s intent of pulling the reader into her world can be said to change the reader’s perspectives which in turn rework the interpretations of the poems.

By means of illustrating what culture does in terms of the collaborative, I begin here with a consideration of the title of the conference: The Cultural Kernel. When the call for papers came, I looked at the keywords and I could see that the ones I liked were the ones that hit me in my own poetic gut. Thus, my first question to myself for a potential paper was this: will there be any stones in it? I stumbled over Lynn Emanuel’s poem "Homage to Sharon Stone" from her 1999 collection Then Suddenly, and decided that it was no small pebble. In it there were definitely stones. I was ready to dig. I reproduce the poem here:

It's early morning. This is the "before,"
the world hanging around in its wrapper,
blowzy, frumpy, doing nothing: my
neighbors, hitching themselves to the roles
of the unhappily married, trundle their three
mastiffs down the street. I am writing this
book of poems. My name is Lynn Emanuel.
I am wearing a bathrobe and curlers; from
my lips, a Marlboro drips ash on the text.
It is the third of September nineteen**.
And as I am writing this in my trifocals
and slippers, across the street, Sharon Stone,
her head swollen with curlers, her mouth
red and narrow as a dancing slipper,
is rushed into a black limo. And because
these limos snake up and down my street,
this book will be full of sleek cars nosing
through the shadowy ocean of these words.
Every morning, Sharon Stone, her head
in a helmet of hairdo, wearing a visor
of sunglasses, is engulfed by a limo
the size of a Pullman, and whole fleets
of these wind their way up and down
the street, day after day, giving to the street
(Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh, PA)
and the book I am writing, an aspect
that is both glamorous and funereal.
My name is Lynn Emanuel, and in this
book I play the part of someone writing
a book, and I take the role seriously,
just as Sharon Stone takes seriously
the role of the diva. I watch the dark
cars disappear her and in my poem
another Pontiac erupts like a big animal
at the cool trough of a shady curb. So,
when you see this black car, do not think
it is a Symbol For Something. It is just
Sharon Stone driving past the house
of Lynn Emanuel who is, at the time,
trying to write a book of poems.

Or you could think of the black car as
Lynn Emanuel, because, really, as an author,
I have always wanted to be a car, even
though most of the time I have to be
the "I," or the woman hanging wash;
I am a woman, one minute, then I am a man,
I am a carnival of Lynn Emanuels:
Lynn in the red dress; Lynn sulking
behind the big nose of my erection;
then I am the train pulling into the station
when what I would really love to be is
Gertrude Stein spying on Sharon Stone
at six in the morning. But enough about
that, back to the interior decorating:
On the page, the town looks bald
and dim so I turn up the amps on
the radioactive glances of bad boys.
In a kitchen, I stack pans sleek with
grease, and on a counter there is a roast
beef red as a face in a tantrum. Amid all
this bland strangeness is Sharon Stone,
who, like an engraved invitation, is asking
me, Won't you, too, play a role? I do not
choose the black limo rolling down the street
with the golden stare of my limo headlights
bringing with me the sun, the moon, and
Sharon Stone. It is nearly dawn; the sun
is a fox chewing her foot from the trap;
every bite is a wound and every wound
is a red window, a red door, a red road.
My name is Lynn Emanuel. I am the writer
trying to unwrite the world that is all around her. (53-54)

Emanuel’s poem here is an example of how the cultural kernel as that which resists us can be overcome by observing domestic practices. While we may not always understand another culture and thus be able to crack its literary productions due to missing implicit referents and indigent symbolizations, daily routine is something that most of us can relate to. We all have bad hair days. Not only does Emanuel establish a close proximity between herself and her reader, by bringing her reader into her house, but she also collaborates with the reader towards understanding the workings of collective cultural competence. If the kernel resists us, or creates a gap, we go for the nearest association. We will understand something, if it must be through misreading. In considering Sharon Stone, the reader who may not know the famous actress, may be prompted to think of the infamous 70s hit song by Smokie: “Who the fuck is Alice?” (Sharon, Gertrude, Lynn):¹

Sally called when she got the word,
She said: "I suppose you've heard -
About Alice".
Well I rushed to the window,
And I looked outside,
But I could hardly believe my eyes -
As a big limousine rolled up
Into Alice's drive...

Oh, I don't know why she's leaving,
Or where she's gonna go,
I guess she's got her reasons,
But I just
don't want to know,
'Cos for twenty-four years
I've been living next
door to Alice.
Alice, who the fuck is Alice?

If we don’t stumble over stones in this song, we certainly get hit by a car. A big car. A limo, to be more precise. Is Emanuel thinking of Alice, when she sees Sharon, one would like to ask? Lynn Emanuel, the speaker of Emanuel’s poem definitely wants to know what Sharon is up to. And she clearly knows who Sharon is. But Sharon is taken out of her context, which makes the act of observing even more significant, particularly as it relates to consolidating the condition of all cultural understanding and subject constitution: look first, imitate, and understand later. So Lynn does what any good amateur anthropologist should: observe what’s going on. In this poem it begins with her taking a seat: by the window, by the door, by the desk. She positions herself strategically in relation to the objects and people that surround her. The aim is to put something on paper. Encircle. What she notices is that the neighbors are also engaged in their routine, namely, playing the role of unhappily married.

The poem shifts quickly between observations that depict cultural manifestations as they happen and their aesthetic translation into text. Characters in their roles, while taking their roles for granted or accepting them as part of societal constraints, are also in a position to pass judgment on their culture’s relentless emphasis on creating sameness. The poem thus suggests that even though we all do the same things, culture itself is a generator of difference. The poem concludes with a desire to “unwrite the world that is all around her,” Sharon Stone, and presumably Lynn Emanuel alike, but not before the reader gets to witness “the carnival of Lynn Emanuels” as a composite of another character embodiment expressed in the wish to be “Gertrude Stein spying on Sharon Stone at six in the morning” (53). What this example demonstrates is that we never experience culture as something ineffectual. The assumption is that we learn to distinguish between the internal and external origins of inspiration by standing in close proximity to “actuality”, or the very thing that happens while it happens.²

As Emanuel’s poem writes itself through the metaphors of cracking the kernel and smashing the core-stone, the style that emerges from the collaboration between the poet, her subject, the poem, and the reader, also demonstrates that the act of portraying establishes a close relationship between the verbal and the visual. While the depiction of Sharon Stone relies on creating an image-world for the reader, which goes beyond language, the fact that the images conjured up are all context-based and anchored in cultural competence points to the significance of how language works in use and the consequences of its being self-referential. What we are dealing with here is a poem which expresses not just ideas (as poems often do primarily) but also a conscious awareness of the workings of language in and through time. While we can easily see Sharon Stone diva’ing about in a limo in 1999, we do not in the same breath associate the idea of a diva with the 50s tradition.

Emanuel portrays herself as a 50s housewife, mocking the last decade of glamour, and contrasts herself here with another ‘housewife’ of the new millennium for whom even the chore of curling the hair involves external agency (as Sharon Stone probably has somebody else attending to her hairdo). The 50s housewife is thus recast in the passive role of watching, observing, and ultimately identifying, yet not with the character under scrutiny, but the character’s role. The irony is that the 50s housewife is endowed with double agency: on the one hand, she has to make sure that the status quo is maintained, (she stays a product of her culture: she is a housewife, before she is a writer), and on the other hand, she has the potential to become someone else, precisely because this potential is activated by the writer within the housewife.

The subtle point that the poem expresses is that while Emanuel may not be a confessional writer who writes in the same vein as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, and Frank O’Hara, at the same time she both acknowledges and subverts the long tradition of articulating mundane situations in highly crafted poetic constructions. She brings in literary figures such as Gertrude Stein, whom the reader familiar with either her writings or photos of her will instantly recognize as being situated in the opposite direction of glamour: not thin, no curls, no housewife. The fact that Stein, who was also concerned with craft and composition, and wrote in a most ordinary language, is here taken as a barometer – as Emanuel would like to hear Stein’s confessions about Stone – indicates a performative gesture on Emanuel’s part which consists of pulling the reader into the image world of ‘stone on stone’, and ultimately letting her carve her own inscriptions.

This example points to the way in which language works as a cultural construct, and how it configures the human condition according to a specific aesthetics. Emanuel’s poem with its concatenation of language awareness and cultural images is ultimately a poem on portraits, a portrait of a poem, a portrait of a (self)portrait and a poem about itself. In other words, a narrative in verse that is not only a manifestation of, but also a gesture towards cultural understanding.

One of the other implicit messages in the poem that we can extrapolate an understanding from is that where culture is concerned events come and go. What remains are portraits, photographs, descriptions of people in other media. What connects us to events either current or the ones that remain distant in the past and thus only have significance for people who have experienced them first hand is that they remind us of something else. In Emanuel’s poem, language itself traverses with and through these events and is shown to adapt itself easily to new modes of representation. We thus go from the event of writing, in which something must be recorded, to activating a memory about a film with Sharon Stone, or a picture that Gertrude Stein portrayed with words. Thus, what Emanuel suggests is that pictures collaborate to inspire writing, and that writing in turn ‘reminds’ us of fleeting visual moments.

All these alternative modes or representations that are the result of cultural manifestations following a dominant in a certain time and age – writing, film, music, painting – are furthermore shown to collaborate towards the process of de-mystifying seemingly strange relations. We take seriously Emanuel’s advice, not to think of big, black cars as symbols for something, but a quick glance at the way in which her writing shapes itself on the page, shows that her “Symbol for Something” is spelled in capital letters which makes us think that Emanuel’s writing betrays her at the very moment its graphical representation takes place. Where this reader is concerned, I can’t stop thinking about the mob driving mysteriously in their black Cadillacs in the 50s. The depiction of Sharon invites that very association insofar as she is portrayed as being a bit mysterious and distant. Any diva with respect for herself will know how to play the mystery part. Roles are thus played seriously. Actors are generous. Directors are merciless. And bit-players take it all in, and then they write about it.

In Emanuel’s poem, the smart move from the trivial associations that we get from linking picture to picture – film to film, song to song, writing to writing – to overcoming the state of ‘this merely reminds me of something’ is done through bringing in a master who knows a thing or two about strange relations. In her famous book, The Making of Americans, written in 1909 and published in 1925, Gertrude Stein repeatedly insists that she writes for herself and strangers. What can culture do in the face of such enunciations, or questions, one is tempted to ask? Or what is the textual cultural practice that enables or conditions the articulation of such enunciations, or questions? What can strangers do for one’s writing, and what can one’s writing do for them? This reminds me of my own writing practice these days when I find it difficult to get out of the essayistic mode, especially when attempting to be most scholarly. More than ever technology has enabled what Stein has prophesied: I blog to myself and strangers. So we associate. But there is nothing new in that. So we associate incongruous events. Nothing new in that either. Perhaps it’s more interesting. So we associate symbolic events. While the situation of ‘nothing new’ presents itself again, we can at least claim self-authorial legitimacy for this or that interpretation.

The knack to dealing with the cultural kernel is not in the cracking, but in the playing of parts. Lynn Emanuel finds Sharon’s question: “Won’t you, too, play a role?” attractive. She is a bit-player, like the rest of us. What is suggested in the line immediately before this question: “amid all this bland strangeness is Sharon Stone” is that in the face of remaining speechless in our encounter with the strange, especially the bland kind, or strangers, especially the blond ones, we can start singing our own praises. The picture that Lynn Emanuel depicts of the other Lynn in the poem, the one who is engaged in a very similar writing practice to our nowadays blogging, is suggestive of the kind of impersonations we are capable of in the face of performing. We assign roles to one another and play the parts too by taking turns at being the other.

But what about the third of September? Is that Sharon’s birthday? Or Gertrude’s? Or Lynn’s? Or is it really about the 15th of November when T.S. Eliot went to see Gertrude in Paris, which made Gertrude write that portrait poem that has wool and silk in it? Lynn says Sharon’s head is swollen, and Gertrude says Eliot’s mouth is woolen. Speech impediment. Or is it about me, having to skip a meeting on the 12th of March, because I have to bash my brain and write on the writers of dates for this gathering here? I collaborate too. I let my friend and colleague, a polyglot punster and professor of German, Hartmut Haberland, know that I’m on my way to France – no pilgrimage on stones – but by flight through air, and this is what he gives me: “Gertrude Stein was born on February 3 as so many other good people. (Joyce was one day early, which must have been a mistake. Groundhog day! Who would eat a ground hog? Well, I better mince my words ...) I was always wondering if Alice B. Toklas was a real name or a pun. I hope your topic doesn’t leave you speechless. ‘Talkless in Reims’ sounds like a take-off on ‘Speechless in Seattle’ (You have my permission to use it.)” And so I do, here, now, to our collective stunning astonishment.

We step around the cultural kernel by looking at the alphabet. Grammar of the stepping-stone. It’s all in there: in the stoning of the text. Gertrude says in her To Do: Book of Alphabets and Birthdays: “alphabets and names make games and everybody has a name and all the same they have in a way to have a birthday” (Stein, 2001: 5). Groundhog day is here to stay. Baptism day.

P.S. The story doesn’t end here. There was a mail from my colleague, one day after he had sent me the above, in which he says: “of course I meant ‘Sleepless in Seattle’. Maybe you thought it was intended (and since we are talking about open texts here), who gives a fuck for my intention?”

It goes to show that if the cultural kernel resists us, we have a couple of choices we can make, at least where authors’ intentions are concerned. The tongue won’t know the difference, if it sleeps, slips, or remains speechless.


~~~

[1] In the original version played by Smokie, there is no reference to the f-word. However, whenever they often played the song in Ireland, the audience would shout "Who the fuck is Alice?" when the main line was sung, "I've been living next door to Alice". The band then decided to do a spoof of their own song and insert the line in their subsequent recording of it. They collaborated for this with the foul-mouthed Roy Chubby Brown, a stand-up comedian.

[2] Russell Edson wrote a collection of prose poems, The Very Thing that Happens (1964) which influenced a number of poets interested in the relationship between readers, writers and the materiality of power in language.

"Minor Characters"? Beat 'Others' 1

After introducing 4 male authors, all white (although not all generically white-bread American), and approximately half of them more or less straight - it is high time to ask whether there were no women Beat writers, and no Beat writers of colour...

The immediate answer is that of course there were some, but none who have gained as much interest (neither publicly, nor academically) as the big four (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs and Snyder), nor even as much as the next echelon of writers, which would count Gregory Corso, Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and perhaps Whalen, Lamantia and Welch (all male). Nor are the main non-writing Beat culture heroes female or black: Cassady, Huncke, Carr - you name 'em - white males...

Thus the sharp irony with which Joyce Johnson titles her memoir of life as a female member of the Beat circle, Minor Characters, is terribly apt. In fact, this irony of marking alterity, simultaneously with hedged belonging, runs through several of the titles which the Beat women who have published about their own lives, as well as the lives of their famous men or fathers, have chosen: Carolyn Cassady's Off the Road and Jan Kerouac's Baby Driver both play off Kerouac's On the Road title and road persona. Two other Beat women's memoirs tell stories of identity crises and formation: Hettie Cohen Jones' How I Became Hettie Jones, and Bonnie Bremser's Troia: Mexican Memoirs (apparently Troia is a Mexican slang term for prostitute) both deal with the sometimes shocking sacrifices these wives made for their husbands, LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) and Roy Bremser, respectively...

However, I have chosen to focus today's blog on two figures who are both excellent poets and have stood up for their identities without subordination and apology. Diane di Prima is a fine, bold poet who has commented on sexual identity and gender inequality through her work (sometimes in a direct writing back to more established male figures), and Amiri Baraka has long since transcended his initial affiliation with the Beats and with his insistence on Black roots and belongings has contributed greatly to political art in the US for at least the last 50 years.

Before discussing these two figures, I do want to point out that the representations of the sexual and racial Other in the Beat 'canon' also are problematic. Kerouac notoriously idolized the racial Other as a Fellaheen primitive, who was more in touch with the land and with the immediacy of human needs and urges, and whose creativity was somehow primordial, and usually pre-linguistic. Thus the great jazz-men of On the Road blow tremendously, but rarely speak - in fact it is their animalistic qualities that are always singled out as their distinguishing marks. The most acute analysis of this figuration of the racial other as the sociopathic, orgasm-directed figure, prowling the subconscious of white disaffected youths, of course remains Norman Mailer's influential essay "The White Negro" which can now be read on-line at Dissent Magazine's website. I recommend that one also reads Frantz Fanon as a companion to Mailer's discourse to get another perspective on what it feels like to wear a white mask over black skin...

The alterity representations get even more striking when the racial and the sexual Other melt into one in Kerouac's prose. Sometimes an unholy marriage of antisemitism and homophobia is found in descriptions of 'fags' and 'queers', and such epithets regularly spilled over into Kerouac's own real-life love-hate relation with Ginsberg (no doubt sometimes spurred on by Kerouac's mother's rather unmitigated racism and bigotry) and his paranoid belief in a Jewish intellectual mafia trying to discredit him and his work.

On other occasions (as in the notorious description of Mardou Fox, the black protagonist of The Subterraneans, whose genitals are seen by the male Kerouac alter ego as oversized and supplemented by monstrous, non-human attributes) it is the depiction of women of colour as promiscuous beings, usually prostitutes - who are on the one hand hotly desired for their primordial sweetness and immediacy (which translates into availability), but on the other always objects of either contempt (when they give in too easily) or fear, as in the case of Terry, the Mexican girl Sal Paradise seduces in On the Road, whom he then instantly decides must be a whore, whose pimp is waiting at the bus station to steal Paradise's money. Although she retaliates by accusing him of being the pimp, and they subsequently make up and Sal spends a bucolic fortnight as a Fellaheen farm worker with her Mexican brothers, he ends up summarily dumping her and moving on when the pressures of her love become too insistent for him to handle...

Not just Kerouac had problems seeing women as equals, as Rebecca Metzger points out in her now apparently defunct blog Beat Generation Women, in which she for instance refers to Ginsberg's less than feminist atitudes towards Elise Cowen, who in addition to being his on-and-off girlfriend during the years Ginsberg experimented with going straight, also served as his typist and would-be friendly critic. Even a quite highly developed consciousness of eco-sensitivity did not stop Gary Snyder from penning a condescending and essentialist poem such as "Praise for Sick Women" (their only apparent sickness being their menstrual cycle), which notoriously begins with these lines:

The female is fertile, and discipline
(contra naturam) only
confuses her
Who has, head held sideways
Arm out softly, touching,
A difficult dance to do, but not in mind.

This reduction of the female to a birdlike simplicity (can dance, but cannot think) is however fortunately not left unchallenged, as Diane di Prima mockingly writes back to him in "The Practice of Magical Evocation":

i am a woman and my poems
are woman's: easy to say
this. the female is ductile
and
(stroke after stroke)
built for masochistic
calm. The deadened nerve
is part of it:
awakened sex, dead retina
fish eyes; at hair's root
minimal feeling

Di Prima rather indelicately reminds the male poet that the vagina has more qualities than he seems to realize: not merely fertile but 'ductile' - pliable both for the penis going 'stroke after stroke' but ultimately also ductile for the event of childbirth. Females are always objectified by other-labelings: as women poets, writing woman's poems; as passive receptacles 'built for masochistic calm', as ultimately fishlike beings of 'minimal feeling'... Note how even the form and graphic lay-out of di Prima's poem, which btw. borrows Snyder's beginning for its epigraph, parodies his structure and mannerisms, such as the show-off'y parenthesis.

Di Prima's other poems in collections such as This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards, Dinners and Nightmares, and Revolutionary Letters, plus her prose in Memoirs of a Beatnik, are all marked by a surefooted sense if independence and self-esteem, while never shying away from controversy and explicit sexuality. Unlike much other confessional literature di Prima's texts regardless of genre are strongly anecdotal and funny in their revelations and observations of the follies of others as well as the poet herself with regards to lifestyle and subcultural choices. In this light it is a bit ironic that di Prima's own official website features a somewhat condescending quote by Ginsberg as its front-page caption, labelling and subtly diminishing her with these words: "A great woman poet in second half of American century, she broke barriers of race-class identity, delivered a major body of verse brilliant in its particularity." Why 'woman' poet, why brilliant 'in its particularity'?

Among the several good online resources for di Prima, I recommend Levity.com's page on her, captioned with a typically ironic "No Problem Party Poem" by her; and, as always with Beat related matters, Literary Kicks has a fine (but too brief) page on her. Why she should be absent from both Poets.org and the Modern American Poetry site is beyond me. Her major later work, such as the poetry cycle Loba has drawn much praise from fellow female poets (Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy), but the testimonials di Prima herself has gathered on her Reviews page come mainly from male colleagues. Her recent memoirs volume, Recollections of My Life as a Woman, has been well received, too, as a chronicle of the Counterculture heyday:

"Because it is so unashamedly personal and true, it will disturb all those who lived that passionate time when theatre and poetry, love and revolution seemed at last conjoined." - Judith Malina

Listen to her read a poem for her grandfather:



The other women writers associated with the Beats have latterly experienced somewhat of a renaissance, involving getting anthologized more as well as having their work re-issued or published anew in better editions. Among these publications I want to mention 3 memoirs: First, Carolyn Cassady's now classic Off the Road, which she discusses among other places at this website which is the official site of the Cassady estate. Carolyn earlier on published a shorter book on the same topic, her menage a trois with Neal and Jack, titled Heart Beat, which was actually turned into a Hollywood movie, starring Nick Nolte.

Secondly, Hettie Jones, who HAS made it into the Academy of American Poets and has a page at their site, despite only debuting with a poetry collection as late as in 1997, and her very detailed account in How I Became Hettie Jones of life with LeRoi Jones and being his partner in running (out of their apartment in the Village) a publishing house, a newsletter and a journal of experimental poetry, Yugen, which was almost unique in bringing together on its pages the various dissident poetry groups and coteries such as the Black Mountain poets, the New York School of Poetry and the Beats. Jed Birmingham has the following to say about Hettie's role:

Much of the work of constructing Yugen was done by Jones’ wife, Hettie Cohen. Cohen worked as an editor at Partisan Review which gave her invaluable experience in putting together a magazine. She performed many editorial tasks as well as designing the layout. Like with many magazines of the period, the construction process, such as collating, folding, mailing, and stapling, provided a center for the literary community. Collating parties became literary events. Hettie Cohen’s How I Became Hettie Jones is mandatory reading on the literary community in New York City in the late 1950s, early 1960s, as is Diane Di Prima’s Recollections of My Life as a Woman. Both books provide detailed accounts of the day-to-day process of running a literary magazine. I highly recommend them.

And finally, Bonnie Bremser, who paid a dearer price than most for following Ray Bremser into refuge from the law in Mexico. There is a very good write-up of Troia: Mexican Memoirs at Bookforum.com by Ronna Johnson. Here is her evaluation of how Bonnie Bremser manages to transcend the conventional victim position that seems scripted for her through her forced life in prostitution:

Both protagonist and narrator, Bremser is a sexual adventuress partaking in the descriptive gusto usually reserved in Beat writing for freewheeling masculinity; her confessed inner states provide the text’s gritty, visceral discourse. Merging memoir with road narrative, domesticity with adventure, Troia inscribes a revisionist, hybrid female protagonist. In this, Frazer [Bremser's birth name] converts “beat”—the subcultural ethos that rejected traditional values and inhibitions for nonconformity,
self-determination, and existential improvisations—to her own specifically gendered ends.

Returning to Joyce Johnson, she is one of several so-called Beat 'muses' or almost-wives who has written about their life with one or several of the Beat luminaries. Her memoir Minor Characters and subsequent other beat related works, such as Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, are special in the sense that they also emphasize the role of herself and other women in the circle of friends and writers, and the real work they did to help the better-known writers to become just that: writers. Interviews with Johnson and Hettie Jones from 1999 (carried out by Nancy Grace) have appeared at the Artful Dodge site, giving also a nice historical frame for the Beats:

Much of my research over the last several years has focused on an attempt to expand the definition of Beat by turning the critical lens toward the women. And there were indeed women involved who were much more than girlfriends, wives, or muses. They were writers themselves--poets, novelists, playwrights, editors--individuals who have thought quite seriously about what it meant, and means, to be Beat.

Closing the book for now on the women Beats, I just want to mention the two readers that have appeared: Brenda Knight's anthology Women of the Beat Generation (2000), and Richard Peabody's A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation (1997). Of the two, Knight offers the slightly better selection (she includes precursors and a few artists) and more volume. Both volumes have their stars, mostly writers I have already mentioned. Both also deservedly feature Elise Cowen who committed suicide in 1962, but left poignant poems behind showing similarities to some of Sylvia Plath's work. One volume of critical essays on women Beat writers complements the two readers particularly well: Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation - ed. by Ronna Johnson and Nancy Grace.

Peabody's book is, strangely enough, the only Beat reader to have been edited by a man - Charters, Waldman and Tonkinson who have compiled the three main Beat readers are all women. So it seems there may still be remnants of a gendered division of labour now transposed to the critical field: the men create, the women compile, archive and comment...

The second part of this post will focus on the work of Amiri Baraka and on the racial other in Beat literature.

Gendered politics in the media

Last month I posted this piece exploring photojournalist representations of Hillary Clinton. Historiann recently commented;

“This is an interesting analysis of the photography of the campaign, and I agree that the photo at the top (Clinton apart from the 3 men) is highly revealing of the dynamics of the race a month ago, before Edwards and Richardson dropped out.”

She continues;

"While it may be true that "The Times, and other msm outlets have been all too willing to portray Hillary as the American Madonna of politics," at least with photography, that's not AT ALL the content of the broadcast media, which is riddled with gendered language and stereotypes that are deployed against Clinton."

This is spot on, and I’m glad she points this out. Furthermore, there are many photographic examples of this as well. My analysis was in fact very specific to that time period, roughly between Iowa and New Hampshire. The narratives are constantly changing both textually and visually. We may even see a return of the Madonna or some other incarnation. I think Historiann’s main point however, is to remind us of an underlying gender bias which continues to be a constant in much of American society, which certainly is reflected through much of the media.

Mette Bertelsen, who recently finished her thesis on gender, politics and Hillary Clinton, will be contributing here in the coming weeks. I can’t tell you if she’ll be specifically looking at media narratives, which is one of my interests. But she will be addressing gender in US politics, so stay tuned for more.

Finally, a small disagreement. Historiann concludes;

“I would say that for her to be running as strong as she is now against Obama is especially remarkable, given the hostility of most broadcast media outlets to treating her with the same consideration as male candidates for the presidency.”

I'm not sure I'd go this far. Should Clinton not win the nomination it won’t be because of media hostility or gender bias. That’s not saying it isn’t or won’t be a factor. Clinton started her campaign as the media and DC establishment’s pre-ordained front runner and nominee, but oh are “they” fickle. No, should Obama win the nomination it will be because his team was ultimately better at realizing the full potential of the internet and the many online grassroots communications tools available today. I think this was supposed to be Hillary’s year and she may still become the nominee and even become the next president. But I don’t think anyone really expected to see online activism and mobilization, which really began with Dean’s 2004 candidacy, explode into the force it’s become.

Ok, that might also be taking it a bit too far.

The main reason for this post when I got up this morning was to introduce two people to the AC, Mette, who will be joining us shortly she assures me, and Historiann, who’s been on our blog role for some months. I was just delighted she stumbled across our little blog and left a comment.

"Historiann is the not very clever pseudonym of Ann M. Little, the author of Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (2007) and several scholarly articles and book chapters on early American women’s and gender history. She is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Colorado State University."

The Motherhood Movement: A New Feminism

I came across this piece in the NY Times by Katharine Seelye, "Women, Politics and the Internet."

What really caught my attention was the mention of Momocrats, a progressive community blog of online mothers who are pulling their resources to effect political change.

Momocrats was started last month by a group of mothers who are all noted bloggers in their own right and who cross-post on each other’s blogs (CityMama, TechMama, LawyerMama, PunditMom and the Silicon Valley Moms Blog), which are generally about daily life with a dose of politics.

“We belong to this community of mothers who blog and we see the need to bridge the gap between the campaign and the community,”

Many argue that American society is overly skewed towards the masculine. By marginalizing the feminine, the argument goes, society becomes overly militaristic, and individualistic, creating a society in a state of disequilibrium.

Lawyer Mama has a very telling post, "Don't Call Us Traitors".

Things have changed in the last year. The situation in Iraq has worsened. More friends of friends or relatives and loved ones of co-workers have died. Now, in a few months my husband will be leaving the reserves after twenty years of service. It doesn't take a giant intellectual leap to figure out why. T doesn't want to leave our boys, ages 1 and 3. T is afraid, not for himself, but for our family.

This kind of honesty isn't often found in any mainstream discourse. Yet it must be how a great many men must feel but would not express outside their immediate families, for fear of being seen as weak and unpatriotic. She goes on;

Many of the people making our foreign policy decisions over the last seven years have distanced themselves from the human face of war. Those who disagree with the administration's policies have been called traitors and supporters of terrorism. But those who wrap themselves in the flag and stand on a pedestal and preach to us about the righteousness of military action have forgotten about the soldiers and their families. Every soldier that dies, and every Iraqi hurt as "collateral damage," is someone's child. They are our brothers and sisters, our mothers and fathers, our wives and husbands.

This message is powerful, and especially powerful when voiced from mothers. That's effectively why Cindy Sheehan's message was so influential. It was a mother's voice who first gained traction and legitimacy as a voice of dissent and protest. We all know the history of how the establishment moved in every possible way to discredit her, but now, a multitude of mothers, many like Lawyer Mama who also have family in the military are joining voices and speaking out against the war.

However, the Motherhood Movement represents much more than opposition to the Iraq war. Mom’s Rising, a political action group co-founded by Joan Blades, founder of MoveOn.org, represents this kind of women/mother driven progressive advocacy;

Started this May 2006, MomsRising already has over 120,000 citizen members--and is growing by 500 to 4,000 per week lately, as well as more than eighty (and growing) aligned national organizations, working together to create positive solutions for the future.

The members of MomsRising are moving important motherhood and family issues to the forefront of the country's awareness, and are working to break the logjam that’s been holding back family-friendly legislation for decades. MomsRising is doing this by providing grassroots support to leaders and organizations addressing key issues such as paid family leave; flexible work options; after-school programs; healthcare for all kids; excellent childcare; realistic, fair wages; and paid sick days for all.

American men, as compared to other Western societies tend to be the least enlightened towards womens issues, and ultimately, how women's issues effect society as a whole. But these women, who are part of a "Motherhood Movement", are our wives, mothers, and sisters. Progressive mothers, and women in general, empowered with online communication and organizational tools are not only creating political power, but may also help bridge the gap between feminism as a female ideology and feminism as an important element to a progressive society. I think this movement will be the linchpin of any sustainable progressive socio-political realignment.