Recipe

Start cooking those noodles, first dropping a bouillon cube into the noodle water. Brown the garlic, onion and crumbled beef in the oil. Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.

–Peg Bracken, The I Hate to Cook Book, via Salon

Bitextual

I came across the Gender Analyzer while reading The Lotus Notebooks and was compelled to give it a spin.  The results?

We guess https://thesmokingsection.wordpress.com/ is written by a man (52%), however it’s quite gender neutral.

Should I feign surprise?

Postfeminism sucks

The problem with political ideas like feminism is that you are not allowed sometimes to say the truth. In Germany we have lots of older, very famous feminists. And it is not allowed for me as a young feminist to say that women are masochistic. I am and all my female friends are. We stand in front of the mirror, we are naked, and we feel ugly as fuck. We see everything as wrong. We try and fight our body to become prettier and work on it. It’s not at all free and self-confident. I don’t want it to be like that, but I see that it is.

–Charlotte Roche, on her novel Wetlands

Meme, Episode Five

I have been beaten up exactly once in my life, an event which of course occurred in middle school.  A gangly, buck-toothed WASP named Emily Thompson had surmised that I was in love with her equally WASPy boyfriend Chris, in spite of the fact that I plainly had a crush on a recent Russian émigré named Peter.  Nevertheless, Emily marshaled a group of our fellow homeroom students, Chris included, to ambush me as I was leaving school, ostensibly to teach me a lesson in heteronormative etiquette. 

I dimly remember being surrounded by the group and pushed to the ground, where I was punched and kicked repeatedly before having a discarded grapefruit rind shoved into my face.  Infinitely more clearly, I remember the gritty taste of the rind, my determination not to cry, and then, after they had all left, to walk home with some semblance of dignity.

When I got home, I told the Albanian rocker chicks what had happened to me and they exploded into a storm of curses and twitchy switchblade-flicking.  Lucy asked me to describe my attackers and I did, gladly, lavishing detail on Emily’s braces and short brown pigtails, which were kept in place with pink beaded hair elastics.  Satisfied that they had all the information they needed, the Albanian rocker chicks assured me that Emily would get her due and then disappeared into their parents’ houses.

I have often tried to imagine what happened the next day.  Although I secretly yearned for a massacre of blood and hair and teeth, more likely, the Albanian rocker chicks accosted Emily at lunchtime, swearing and flicking to great effect but doing little more.  Whatever transpired, when I saw Emily after school she apologized to me, solemnly, almost nervously, as though she was trying very hard to do it right.  I politely accepted her apology, knowing full well that it would never have been given if she wasn’t afraid.

That summer, I decided to audition for art school.  And yes, that is her real name.

Meme, Episode Three

I drank my first beer with a gang of Albanian rocker chicks who lived on my street.  There were four of them, all older than me and impossibly cool in their black-and-white Led Zeppelin rock shirts and skin-tight Road Runner jeans.  One of them, Lucy, carried a small silver switchblade which she said she used in fights, a claim I wasn’t sure I believed but was impressed by anyway.

I liked the Albanian rocker chicks and was captivated by their swaggering take on femininity, which couldn’t have been further removed from the polite Canadian version I encountered each day at school.  Years later, after I joined my first band, I would try to summon their spirit in the taut moments before walking onstage, and although I invariably failed in my attempts it gave me just enough courage to be there at all.  

I sometimes think that the problem with contemporary academic feminism is that there aren’t any Albanian rocker chicks in it.  Imagine what it would be like if there were.

Die Eier

Inspired by the delightful Miss Susie Q, I decided that I would finally read Rilke.  Yes, Rilke.  So far, this is my favourite bit:

And perhaps the sexes are more akin than people think, and the great renewal of the world will perhaps consist in one phenomenon: that man and woman, freed from all mistaken feelings and aversions, will seek each other not as opposites but as brother and sister, as neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to bear in common, simply, earnestly, and patiently, the heavy sex that has been laid upon them.

Not at all bad for 1903, eh?

The majority rule

From the New York Times:

[T]here is no going back to a world where we can assume that marriage is the main institution that organizes people’s lives.

Well, about bloody time.

Little mysteries

Me: The Sequel poses the question: do women scan? Well, sure. As I wrote here some time ago, we just do it a little differently.

I’ll let you in on a secret, though: sometimes, we look too. The shirt that rides up, exposing the crest of a hip; the calf that tightens as it bears down on a bike pedal; the faded jeans that hang just so. But I think the way we look is more idiosyncratic; we catch glimpses of sex in a thousand places because that’s what we’re used to, because no one thought to direct our gaze. Girls have wandering eyes – consider yourselves warned.

If I didn’t have to work in the morning, I’d tell you more.