Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Sad Comics for Grownups


The acquisitions staff at our local library shares my passion for graphic novels. The term is a bit of a misnomer because many books in this genre aren’t “novels” at all–they’re nonfiction or collections of short pieces–but it sounds better than “comic books your kids wouldn’t understand”. Below, a brief roundup of some of my latest reading.

R. Sikoryak’s inventive and darkly funny Masterpiece Comics mashes up the plots of literary classics with the visual style of well-known comic strips. This could easily have been a one-joke wonder, but Sikorsky’s thoughtful pairings give this slim volume an unexpected depth. Reading it, you realize that Charlie Brown actually does have a lot in common with Kafka’s Gregor Samsa; ditto for Beavis and Butthead and the protagonists of Waiting for Godot. You come away appreciating the existential sadness under comics’ forced jollity and limited range of expression, as well as the slam-bang action and excitement buried inside these books we treat so reverently. Maybe high school boys would crack open Wuthering Heights if they read Sikorsky’s “Tales from the Crypt” version first.

The early 20th-century anarchist Emma Goldman is often quoted as saying, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” Seeking an alternative to my feminist friends’ grim suspiciousness of popular culture and fashion, I picked up Sharon Rudahl’s cartoon biography of Goldman, A Dangerous Woman. The book definitely made me want to learn more about Goldman, a feisty and life-affirming woman who put herself at risk to improve the lives of prisoners, prostitutes, and other marginalized people. However, I was a bit disappointed by the presentation. The visual elements didn’t interact dynamically with the text, feeling more like illustrated summaries than true scenes. Since Rudahl relies mainly on Goldman’s own account of her life, the book always casts her actions in a positive light, glossing over difficult moral questions like the anarchists’ use of violence against civilians. A Dangerous Woman is an intriguing introduction to the subject, but I wouldn’t rely on it as the definitive word on this complicated historical figure.

Alison Bechdel is the author of the long-running comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, a witty sapphic soap opera whose humor often arises from the contrast between the characters’ self-righteous political views and their messy personal lives. I binged on 10 volumes of the strip from 1989 to 2005. The left-wing rants sometimes became tiresome, so my favorite characters were the ones who didn’t take themselves so seriously: the gleefully careerist Sydney, a literature professor with a Martha Stewart fetish; Lois, the part-time drag king and full-time sexual dynamo; and Mo’s two Siamese cats, who survey their human companions’ anxious lives with amused detachment.

My highest praise, though, is reserved for Bechdel’s cartoon memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which is both beautifully drawn and elegantly crafted as a narrative. Fun Home intertwines the author’s coming of age as a lesbian with her memories of her brilliant, enigmatic, repressed father, a closeted homosexual who died in an accident that she suspects was suicide. Drawing parallels to sources as diverse as Joyce, Colette, Proust, classical mythology, and The Wind in the Willows, she shows how their shared love of literature substituted for the intimacy they could never express in more personal terms. Some online reviewers felt Bechdel strained too hard to fit their family story into literary templates, but for me, that was what gave the book its special poignancy: ultimately, Bechdel concludes that there are no neat explanations that will give her closure, and we return to the simple image that opened the story, a little girl in her father’s arms.

New Poems by Conway: “An Error” and Others


My prison pen pal “Conway” has been a prolific writer this winter, undaunted by his unfair reclassification to a more restricted security status that further limits his access to family visits and reading materials. In January, I sent him some writing prompts, including one that suggested beginning every sentence of a paragraph with “in the kitchen”. Conway changed it to something more relevant to his experience, as you can see in the two prose-poems below.

An Error

Holding, this quiet inside my soul
Scolding the noise silently
That threatens to regain control.

Even as this jealous rain falls to & fro–
all around, calls out from the ground.
I know where things have led, so…

Who really is humble, in deed?
This simple thought provokes an abyss,
A deep ocean of ungraspable water.

How do I see into the clear depth
without glimpsing a reflection. Then
distorted by my trembling attempts, to
escape this prison of error…

****

In Prison (1)

In prison, there’s no reason why these toilets should be so loud. In prison, noise is not allowed by prisoners. In prison I turned a pair of eyeglasses into a sewing needle, it took a long time. But, it passed it also. In prison they gave a guy three years for a sewing needle. It was a plea bargain they threatened to strike him out. In prison we don’t talk about how much it costs to make your clothes fit and shit like that. Would you? In prison I grew. My children did too. But without a clue of who I am. In prison I got a letter from you, it made me feel better, but only for a while. So, I read it again and again. Whenever I feel the need to smile. In prison they were running yard, it was cold and hard because of the rain. But we try our best to not complain. In prison they say “True that,” ’cause no one’s getting fat in prison. Because in prison they shove the food through the tray slot in the door, they don’t allow us in the chow hall anymore. But, that’s cool. I don’t like eating with some of those fools anyway. In prison I wondered out loud. I wondered what the taxpayers would think about paying thirty five thousand dollars a year for a sewing needle? In prison we think about stupid shit like that, but the district attorney doesn’t yet! In prison? He’s the one who should have to sew his clothes with this sewing needle, in prison…

****

In Prison (2)

In prison at least five or ten minutes we passed a verbal down the tier. The dinner was chicken goo. In prison they were crop dusting and the steel door was rusting in the fumes of time. In prison we were doing burpees all day and breaking the rules with loud cadences. But in prison the rules are made to be broken, like spokes on an old bike, rattling down the road. In prison the commode is so fuckin loud it howls hungrily for shit. In prison the walls shine, from being touched and rubbed on too much. In prison I saw a rabbit die in the electric fence and crows chasing hawks, if that makes sense, it does kind of, ’cause the hawks eat crow when they can catch them slippin’; so maybe it’s not so strange to me. In prison these words are ridiculous but I’m still writing in prison…

Anarchists and Misogyny


I became friends with radical feminist activist and author Lierre Keith four years ago when my husband and I began working to raise awareness of women’s oppression by prostitution and pornography. (See our website NoPornNorthampton for more information.) Lierre’s latest book is The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. In this controversial work, she argues that vegetarian and vegan diets are actually not as good for human health, or the planet, as an omnivorous diet that is based on more sustainable agricultural principles. The first chapter is online here.

As anyone who reads the New Testament knows, food taboos are a powerful cultural marker. Challenging them threatens people’s identity. Many left-liberal folks get a significant self-esteem boost from the belief that their culinary self-denial makes the world a greener and more compassionate place.

I don’t know whether Lierre’s right, though I plan to read her book and find out. What I do know is that violence against women is never acceptable. Silencing unpopular speakers through assault and intimidation is not liberal, compassionate, or progressive.

Some folks at last weekend’s San Francisco Anarchist Bookfair haven’t figured this out yet.

As Lierre was reading from her book at the SF County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park, three young men rushed the stage and hit her in the face with pies containing cayenne pepper–the equivalent of pepper spray in her eyes. The IndyBay website, which bills itself as “a non-commercial, democratic collective of bay area independent media makers and media outlets”, has posted a flippant story approving the assault, along with a video replaying the incident while slapstick music plays in the background.

I wrote this letter to IndyBay asking them to take down the video. If my readers would like to follow suit, please send email to sf*******@*************ia.org .

As a friend of Lierre Keith, who has worked alongside her to defend women’s rights, I am appalled that you would post this video, which repeatedly shows her being hit in the face with a pie containing cayenne pepper, accompanied by a comical musical soundtrack:

www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/03/15/18641249.php

Violence against women (and cayenne pepper in your eyes is certainly violence) is never a joke.

I have no opinion on the great vegan debate. I simply think that it trashes the credibility of the left-liberal and anarchist movements to allow young men to assault and silence women, and then publish the video as entertainment. If we want to reduce the power of the state, we need to show that we’re fit for self-governance, not acting like kindergarten bullies.

[Update: The video has been posted on YouTube, so if you come across it, please hit the “Flag” button to report it as abusive content.]

To add insult to injury, some commenters at the fair and on the IndyBay website derided Lierre for filing a police report. Anarchists don’t call the cops, they said. (For the record, Lierre does not identify as a member of the modern anarchist movement, though she admires the early 20th-century anarchists who fought against fascism.)

Personally, I don’t have enough faith in human nature to be an anarchist or a communist. Power corrupts, so power needs to be decentralized–distributed in a balanced way among individuals, private institutions, and the state, with constant adjustments to the balance as one or another group learns how to game the system to its advantage.

In a misogynistic society, which all societies have been to some extent, a power vacuum at the state level simply leaves individual men’s physical power over women unchallenged.

Perfect freedom for some people always means less freedom for others. It sounds nice in theory, just like the First Amendment: “Congress shall make NO law…abridging the freedom of speech”. Yet Congress does this all the time with laws regulating antitrust, copyright, securities offerings, and many other areas. However, when it comes to videos of women being attacked and humiliated for men’s entertainment (and Lierre has pointed out the similarity between the IndyBay video and gonzo porn), suddenly everyone’s a free speech absolutist.

Except, of course, the women who aren’t allowed to speak at all.
 

Online Literary Roundup: Stories by Chad Simpson, Renee Thompson, Steve MacKinnon


Time once again to share some good reads I’ve discovered in online literary journals. Two are short-shorts, a form that’s well-suited to reading on the web, and one is a satisfying longer piece of historical fiction.

Chad Simpson’s “Phantoms“, from the new issue of Freight Stories, offers a surprising and beautiful perspective on the phenomenon of phantom limb sensation in amputees. I know, that doesn’t sound like a feel-good topic, but watch what he does with it.

Renee Thompson’s “Farallon“, a recent Story of the Week from Narrative Magazine, is a quietly compelling tale of redemption. Set in the 19th century, its main character is a criminal who’s been exiled to a rocky island to harvest gulls’ eggs. The reader, like the protagonist, may initially despair that anything meaningful could happen to a man marooned in this bare environment. Thompson solves this dilemma in a skillful and heart-tugging way.

Finally, Steve MacKinnon’s “Read Me One“, from The Pedestal Magazine, puts two men in a booth in a diner, one reading love letters to the other. This brief meditation on the nature of intimacy, and its failures, is never what you’d expect.

The Motherhood of God


MadPriest, a/k/a Reverend Jonathan Hagger, is one of my favorite Christian bloggers. He combines a naughty sense of humor with a passionate concern for the poor and marginalized. What he modestly calls his “bog-standard sermons” are anything but. In his latest one, he muses on the different ways we have tried to express the feminine aspect of God within a monotheistic religion and a patriarchal culture. An excerpt:

…Our pagan ancestors understood the importance of the feminine in the scheme of things and this understanding led to the creation of female deities. Looking at the world, and the balance between male and female, our forebears projected their world view onto their gods, and because they had many gods, they could have both male and female gods. Of course, this could not be done in the monotheistic religions, the religions, such as Judaism, which only had one god. In such religions all the attributes of godliness had to be included within the personality of just one god. In a fair world this would have meant that the understanding of God would have been of a deity who was both male and female or neither. Unfortunately, human projection of their own society onto the society of the godhead, meant that in a predominantly patriarchal society, God came to be seen as predominantly patriarchal himself . God was seen as male. A full blooded, dominant, aggressive male at that.

However, the need for a balance in the human understanding of the divine nature of God, meant that there was never complete acceptance of a completely male God. Even in Judaism, that most male dominated of religions, there can be found hints of femininity within God’s personality. In the book of Isaiah God says, “For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labour, I will gasp and pant,” and elsewhere, “ For thus says the LORD: I will extend prosperity to her like a river, and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing stream; and you shall nurse and be carried on her arm, and dandled on her knees. As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” In Psalm 131 we hear the psalmist say, ‘But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother; my soul is like the weaned child that is with me. O Israel, hope in the LORD from this time on and forevermore.”

More important than these brief references was the Old Testament understanding of the Wisdom of God. Wisdom is seen in the Old Testament as one of the primary characteristics of God and is almost regarded as a separate person within the godhead, and wisdom in this respect is most definitely female. For example, Wisdom, chapter nine, states,

“With you is wisdom, she who knows your works and was present when you made the world; she understands what is pleasing in your sight and what is right according to your commandments. Send her forth from the holy heavens, and from the throne of your glory send her, that she may labour at my side, and that I may learn what is pleasing to you. For she knows and understands all things, and she will guide me wisely in my actions and guard me with her glory.”

It is interesting to note that the Egyptian god of wisdom was the great goddess, Isis, herself. The people of the Middle East definitely believed that wisdom was very much a female characteristic. It is even more interesting to note that, within Christianity, the Wisdom of God becomes the Word of God, and the Word of God becomes the Son of God in his incarnation as Jesus Christ. We have a situation where the preexistence of Jesus within God is not of necessity male. This multi-gendered God became man. Genderwise, the Word was something else before becoming man. That is an important point for us to remember.

But what about Jesus, the man? What did he have to say about the nature of God?

Firstly, Jesus affirms the maleness of God, over and over again. Jesus refers to God as his father; he prays to God, his father. There is no doubt that the language Jesus uses indicates a masculine deity. However, the personality that Jesus attributes to God, God’s caring, forgiving nature, God’s physical and emotional closeness to God’s children is not archetypical male. Furthermore, I think this scares the male hierarchy of the church. So much so that they took all the female attributes Jesus said God the Father had and put them on Mary, the mother of Jesus. The cult of the Virgin Mary is in reality a displaced reverence for the feminine in God as revealed to us by Jesus Christ.

And, although Jesus was physically a man we must be very careful not to confuse this mere accidental with the real nature of the Word incarnate. When God became man in Jesus Christ he took on both the limitations of human language and the limitations of the human culture of the time. No human language can fully describe God, it can only give us a very limited view of our creator. Jesus had to use human language and so he had to give God a gender because the conventions of human language demanded it. That is why Jesus did not restrict his teaching to the spoken word alone. He preached the good news about God through action, through the things he did, and when he did speak about God it was often in parables that were meant to be understood within the heart rather than just within the mind. Within these parables, parables such as the one about the prodigal son, we see a God who is not restricted by the stereotypical ideas of maleness current at the time. God is loving of his children, he embraces them like a mother embraces her children, and we see this also in Jesus, in his gentleness, in the way he deals with people. Within Christ and within Christ’s understanding of God there is a balance between the male and the female. There is the necessary maleness of Jesus overturning the tables in the Temple, but there is also the gentle Jesus, calling the children to him….

Read the whole sermon here.

Saturday Random Song: Brenton Brown, “Lord, Reign in Me’


Tomorrow our church begins a two-week class on contemporary Christian music. This praise song was on the CD included with the class materials, and I’ve been listening to it every day. After a long spell of numbness, I don’t yet feel the creative energy of God moving in me again, but I’m almost ready to ask Him for it. That’s always a good sign.

Over all the earth, You reign on high
Every mountain stream, every sunset sky
But my one request, Lord, my only aim
Is that You’d reign in me again

Lord, reign in me, reign in Your power
Over all my dreams in my darkest hour
You are the Lord of all I am
So won’t You reign in me again

Over every thought, over every word
May my life reflect the beauty of my Lord
‘Cause you mean more to me than any earthly thing
So won’t You reign in me again

Signs of the Apocalypse: French Execs Pay to Be Kidnapped


The latest Springwise weekly business trends e-newsletter profiled this new form of entertainment for thrill-seeking Frenchmen:

“Kidnapping”, “Manhunt” and “Go-Fast Adventure” are all among the standard services Ultime Réalité offers, but it’s open to special requests. Through the company’s simulated kidnapping packages, for instance, the participant is abducted without warning—after leaving a restaurant, say, or in the supermarket parking lot. Paying “victims” are then bound, gagged and imprisoned for four or 10 hours (depending on the scenario they choose), allowing them to experience the terror of the real thing. Additional elements such as ransom, escapes and helicopter chases can also be involved. Manhunt packages, meanwhile, can last either one or two days, with the option to play the role of either hunter or prey. Then there’s the Go-Fast Adventure, where participants take the role of a drug dealer smuggling cargo on the high seas. Finally, a recently added “extreme” package allows clients to wake up on an autopsy table in a morgue, surrounded by corpses and body bags. Pricing on a basic kidnap package is EUR 900.

What if a staged kidnapping turns into a real one? How would you know? I see potential for
a great action movie here. (If you use this idea and make a million dollars, please spend it on copies of Swallow.)

Poetry Videos from Thirsty Word Reading Series: Karen Johnston, Ellen LaFleche, Jendi Reiter


The Thirsty Mind Coffee & Wine Bar in South Hadley, MA, was kind enough to host our first-ever Thirsty Word poetry reading series last month. We’re hoping to organize another event in early May. Featured readers were Karen Johnston, Ellen LaFleche, and myself. Enjoy these videos recorded by Adam Cohen. Each is about 25 minutes long. Thanks also to Mary Serreze for setting up the audio equipment. Mary is the publisher of NorthamptonMedia.com, a local news site where I cover the public housing beat.

Karen G. Johnston is a social worker by vocation, a poet by avocation, a socialist by inclination, a UU-Buddhist by faith, and mother by choice. Her writing has been published in Silkworm, Equinox, Concise Delight, WordCatalyst, and Women. Period. An Anthology of Writings on Menstruation.

Ellen LaFleche has a special interest in poems about working class people, and issues of health and healing. She has published in numerous journals, including Many Mountains Moving, Alehouse, Alligator Juniper, the Ledge, New Millennium Writings, and Naugatuck River Review.

Jendi Reiter is the author of the poetry collections Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009) and A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003), and editor of the writers’ resource website WinningWriters.com. Award-winning poet Ellaraine Lockie has said of her work, “Jendi Reiter’s poems are arrows that plunge dead center into the hearts of feminism, religion, death, the interior of mental health and psychotherapy.”



Thursday Random Song: Scissor Sisters, “Intermission”


I discovered the Scissor Sisters in a (possibly apocryphal) forwarded email in which a conservative pastor was warning parents about cultural influences that would turn their children gay. It’s working.

(The song is only 2:36 minutes but all the videos I could find on YouTube were 3:51 minutes, with an extra minute of dead air at the end. Is it meant to symbolize The Void? Listen and decide.)

Intermission

When you’re standing on the side of a hill
Feeling like your day may be done
Here it comes, strawberry smog
Chasing away the sun
Don’t let those precious moments fool you
Happiness is getting you down
A rainbow never smiles or blinks
It’s just a candy colored frown

You were going on at half-past seven
Now it’s going on a quarter to nine
All the angels want to know
Are you lost or treading water?
And you’re going on your fifteenth bender
But you’ve only got a matter of time
Yes we’ve all got seeds to sow
Not everyone’s got lambs to slaughter

When the night wind starts to turn
Into the ocean breeze
And the dew drops sting and burn
Like angry honey bees
That is when you hear the song falling from the sky
Happy yesterday to all
We were born to die
Sometimes you’re filled with the notion
The afterlife’s a moment away
You want to tell someone the way that you feel
But then you ain’t got nothing to say
You fight for freedom from devotion
A battle that will always begin
With somebody giving you a piece of advice;
By the way you’re living in sin

Now there’s never gonna be an intermission
But there’ll always be a closing night
Never entertain those visions
Lest you may have packed your baggage
First impressions are cheap auditions
Situations are long goodbyes
Truth so often to living dormant
Good luck walks and bullshit flies

When the headlights guide your way
You know the place is right
When the treetops sing and sway
Don’t go to sleep tonight
That is when you see the sign
Luminous and high:
Tomorrow’s not what it used to be
We were born to die
Happy yesterday to all
We were born to die


Lyrics courtesy of
Sing365.com

Stephanie Soileau on Fiction and Moral Ambiguity


The prestigious literary journal Glimmer Train regularly publishes short essays about the writing process by their fiction contest winners. I appreciated these thoughts from Stephanie Soileau, winner of the December 2009 Fiction Open. Referring to Bruno Bettelheim’s theory that fairy tales give children a safe space to process the darkness and complexity of life, she suggests that all fiction writing can serve a similar function:

I believe in storytelling as a way to map and explore the ambiguities of human experience, and it is this belief that motivates me as a fiction writer. Stories have given me a language to express the contradictions in my own experience, and because writing them has been an often challenging exercise in sympathy and compassion, I have come to see the practice of storytelling as a moral imperative. But the morality is in the practice, not in the story itself. Fiction is no place for sermons, for conclusive answers. Whether we’re reading or writing them, the best fiction gives us a woods to get lost in, and if at the end, we have come to no conclusions, if we are only left with more questions, the questions themselves are something like a map, and we emerge from this woods a little better able to find our way.

The March Fiction Open is accepting entries now through the end of the month, with a top prize of $2,000.
Read more thoughts by winning authors in the Glimmer Train Bulletin.