seriously, what the eff?

As a small and unassuming girl who swears both frequently and creatively, I am astonished by how often the people who hear me swear are astonished. I know several people who have said to me, with awe in their voices "I've never heard you swear before!" and who have then said the exact same thing to me a few weeks later. And again, later. They're rarely right, but something about my appearance leads to the impression that I'm far more mild-mannered than I am.

Reading Steven Pinker's excellent article about cursing, I couldn't help but wonder if the problem is simply a disconnect in their minds caused by the fact that I am not just clean and blonde and pretty, but also very good at performing my femininity. In other words: girls don't shit. But we do! And we piss and fuck and use the most remarkable language when we get cut off in traffic or stub our beautifully-shod toes. And as I read along, I felt sure that Mr. Pinker understood all of this. Until:

Men swear more, on average, and many taboo sexual terms are felt to be especially demeaning to women-- hence the old prohibition of swearing "in mixed company."

A sex difference in tolerance for sexual language may seem like a throwback to Victorian daintiness. But an unanticipated consequence of the second wave of feminism in the 1970s was a revived sense of offense at swearing, the linguistic companion to the campaign against pornography.

Apparently, we're all prudes: either Dworkinites or Victorian throwbacks. And in two relatively short paragraphs, he almost managed to ruin the whole article for me, relying on lazy (and nonsense) evolutionary psychology arguments about how women have so little to gain from sex and are thus uncomfortable with even discussing it. Nowhere else in the article does he fail to consider the ways in which social structures influence our usage and understanding of language, so the misstep here is puzzling.

so, so many

A gift from my afternoon gmail inbox: it's not quite an infinity of poems, but it's damn close. I have a copy of the Oulipo Compendium, which he took this translation from, and there's something wonderful about leafing through it and using some agency in combining (composing? not quite)the lines, but this web version has a certain automatic charm of its own.

And of course, I'd love to own one of these. But that's not likely to happen any time soon.

one word

I used to write poems that reveled in brevity, poems that maxed out at three lines, three short lines, even. They weren't easy to write, unless they came to me entirely whole, already created out of the ether. Those were lovely, to be sure, but the majority of them were heavily polished little gems, careful creations masquerading as feats of inspiration.

Sometimes, the titles were longer than the poems. Other times, the titles were the only things shorter. Sometimes, they just had numbers. Lately, I can't write like that, but this delightful post (found via Bookslut) about short poems reminds me of how satisfying it was.

Last night, we were talking about The Fear of Losing Eurydice and AVA, because I'm re-reading the first and always thinking about the latter, and because there is a resonance between them that I was trying to explain. I think it boils down to this: each sentence in each book is as dense and vivid and carefully self-contained as one of these poems. Even in Eurydice, where they're not set apart visually, each sentence is a separate revelation, a discrete and lovely work that is linked thematically but not grammatically to the surrounding text.

Last night, I said they were similar "flights of language," a phrase I meant to reference the irresistibly infectious quality of flights of fancy, but also the delicious experience of flights of wine: words that take wing, and words that allow you to taste a range of ideas and images. Each word a rare bird.

password

via Maud Newton, a list that reminds me overwhelmingly of one of the best scenes in Hackers. I don't think there's any overlap between the two lists (what are the passwords: god, sex, love, power, password and the user's own name?), but the idea is essentially the same. Humans are a remarkably predictable breed.

eurydice, lost

Julieta Campos died a few days ago. Searching online, I've been able to find only one English language obituary. It's short, and I hope that's because I missed the longer ones; maybe they've all disappeared since last week. This is probably not a reasonable hope, but I'm holding on to it, regardless.

I'll re-read The Fear of Losing Eurydice soon, and I'll write more about it then.

In the meantime, an interview.

fashion

I couldn't love this more.

More about why I love it: it seems like a commentary on fact and permanence, and the ways in which we transmit information. back in the day, a sweater was something that took weeks to knit, a handmade object that had a certain metaphorical, personal weight to it. similarly, a newspaper had a certain once-a-day heft. to me, this is project all about trying to lend that permanence and personal-ness to a modern machine-knitted sweater, and also to the ever-changing constantly-being-reported-and-updated news of today.

If the above seems ungrammatical or out of context, it's from an email. Don't judge me for the incredible number of hyphens. Apparently, I was in a hyphen-heavy kind of mood.

(found on CRAFT:)

startling

If I told you the book I'm reading included a scene of attempted self-castration, I suspect you'd conclude that I was reading someone like Chuck Palahniuk, someone who would write about the heat of the blood, the snap of the tendons (are there even tendons in there? I don't know, but it sounds plausible), the sudden excess of liquid, and the undeniable sexuality of the whole experience. It would be the kind of scene that causes girls to faint in the subway.

In this case, though, it's not. It's a quiet scene, as ambiguous as anything of its kind can be. The narrator slips off into the bathtub, razor in hand, and we're told of blood, of pain, and of his eventual faint. Nothing is explicit, and it's not until a few pages later that the reader is entirely, finally convinced that their suspicious were correct, and this confirmation comes only in the form of unscarred wrists. Regardless, this particular moment of mutilation feels entirely necessary, a silent and bloody means of further subsuming the terror of sexuality.

The book? The Seraglio, by James Merrill. Published in 1957, the first of the only two novels he ever published. He's well known as a poet, but wrote the two novels when he was relatively young; neither one is anything like what you'd expect, and both are quite remarkable. Truth be told, I liked the other better, and apparently I'm not the only one. It's still in print.