Pictures, Privacy, and Our Underpathos

I used to teach Business and Professional Writing, which often felt more like an etiquette class than a writing class.  I was always astonished at how much students didn't know (yes, your resume must be typed; a thank you note is always a good idea).  It never occurred to me to hold a class session about sending pictures of one's private parts (even underwear clad) to people.  We all just seemed to know not to do that.

Well, except for politicians.  When is that ever a good idea?  Those garments are called underpants for a reason!

And does this approach ever work as a pick-up technique? 

The Washington Post has already done a much better job than I can do with the humorous angle, an article with this suggestion:  "Men! Broaden your seduction techniques!  How about you move away from the below-the-waist close-up? How about you try going naked from the waist up? How about a picture of you, sweaty, cleaning out the storm drain? How about a photograph of you gently caressing the yogurt, as you rotate the soon-to-expire food to the front of the refrigerator? So sexy!"

I have a friend who becomes enraged every time she realizes that her life isn't as private as she hopes it will be.  But she goes to great lengths to keep her private life private:  an unlisted phone number, never giving out her address, that kind of thing.  She would never blog, never, because she would assume that someone would figure out her neighborhood.

I remember the first morning I wrote in my journal after Senator Packwood had to turn over his journal in the mid 90's, and we all got to see the insipid things he wrote about (his hair, as I recall, amongst many other things--his journals were thousands of pages).  I had always assumed that my journals would stay private, that I could say whatever innocuous things I wanted and no one would ever know, unless I was long dead or unless I released them.  But the Packwood experience showed us that one can't assume that level of privacy.  I found myself wishing I had something profound to say in my journal, in case it was subpoenaed.

And here we are, almost two decades later, with people keeping online diaries that anyone can read, with people posting pictures of all sorts electronically, with a lack of privacy that would have horrified past generations.

Does that make us careless?

Still, I can't quite fathom why people in the public eye more so than most of us seem to make these goofs.  You'd think they'd be extra careful.

And it's always men.  I know of no middle-aged women who would send pictures of their nether regions out into the world.  When groups of women I know take pictures, we have to arrange ourselves so that our flared hips are hidden, so that our faces are at their best angle, so that the light falls on us just right.

Maybe women are more conscious of how the world sees us and how the world might see us because we have been socialized to be aware of that and many of us have been trained to be aware of the risks inherent in how the world sees us.  There's a risk in being too beautiful, too sexy, too revealing; there's also a risk in being too plain, too buttoned up, too ugly.

I also wonder if those of us who have gone to graduate school and worked with texts of all types have a different take on the public face and the private face and how they inform each other.

No, I'm probably being much too academic.  Men who send pictures of their body parts or who frequent prostitutes or who abuse hotel staff or who prey on interns are probably convinced that they're powerful men who won't get caught.

Insert heavy sigh here.  As I asked yesterday, what year is it anyway?  Have we not become enlightened, evolved humans yet?

Monday Musings on Gender, Teenage Theatre Geeks, and Playing Scrabble with Naipaul

--So, I thought I wouldn't write about V. S. Naipaul's outrageous comments about the differences between male and female authors.  Really?  We're still having this conversation?  What year is it?

Do people really think that we can tell gender just by reading the text?  Go to the Guardian site to see if you really can by taking this quiz.

And then there's the whole notion of gender.  Do you see gender as binary or as a spectrum?

My prediction:  in 100 or 200 years, people will look back and say, "How quaint.  They thought there were only 2 genders.  Luckily we have the scientific advances that help us understand that gender is nothing like those people thought it was."

--Today is Maxine Kumin's birthday.  She had to deal with similar comments about gender and writing too.  The Writer's Almanac post for today notes:  "When she was chosen as the Poet Laureate in 1980, she promptly criticized one of her fellow members of the Council of Scholars—the violinist Yehudi Menuhin—who wrote a paper about how men and women approach life and art differently. Menuhin said, 'The man is driven to strike out, to build roads—roads anywhere and nowhere in particular—sometimes leading to heaven, more often back to self—and general destruction. The woman is, on the other hand, compelled to plough and till over and over again the same plot of earth, from time to time attracting a male to ensure its fertility and, if she has captivated him, defending it together, or alone, against other male depredations.' Maxine Kumin did not take kindly to this characterization, nor to the fact that of the 23 members of the Council of Scholars, only two were women. She said, 'I felt as though I had stumbled into a stag club and ought to leap out of a cake. Creativity is not the exclusive province of this very narrow slice of society.'"

Kumin's life shows us that the best revenge may be living long and writing productively.  Let the old, poisonous men say whatever they choose.

--It does make me happy that people have responded to Naipaul's comments for the misogynous poison that it is.  Once upon a time, we'd have quivered with respect and said, "Well, he's won a Nobel Prize, so he must know what he's talking about."

Now we say, "Sexist piffle.  What is wrong--WRONG--with this man???!!!!!"

Of course, it irritates me that he gets so much attention by saying such things, even as we reject the things he's saying.

Again, I say, what year is it?  We'll know we've made significant progress when outrageous comments don't get any attention at all and don't result in extra book sales.

--I've spent the week-end plunging back through time as I enjoyed Linda Grant's We Had It So Good.  I might not have been so anxious to read this book had I not heard Diane Rehm's interview with Linda Grant.  I put it on reserve at the public library (I rarely do that) and promptly forgot that I did it.  When I went to the library to pick up the book, it was like an extra treat, that Christmas present that you get after New Year's.

If you enjoy books about the 60's and watching Baby Boomers move through history, you'll like this book.  Even as I typed that last sentence, I felt a bit of revulsion.  But these characters are worth getting to know.  It's not stereotypical, it's not two dimensional, it's not horrible in the way that it could have been.

--Yesterday, I went back in time in a different way.  I went to see a teenage drama troupe present Shakespeare to Go.  What a delight.  I talked to one of the parents afterward, and we talked about how well-adjusted these teens seem to be.  I said, "When I was a teenager, I'd have been that girl in the corner with her nose stuck in a book."

The mother said, "Yes, but that's what's so wonderful about these kids having the opportunity to be part of this group.  It gives them so much self-awareness and the ability to interact so much better."

I decided not to mention my own experience as a teenage drama geek which I've written about elsewhere

(here, here, and here).  I decided just to enjoy a chat with a woman I'll likely never see again.

--After the show, I played Scrabble at Panera with two women--what fun!

Panera was mostly deserted at 3:30 in the afternoon.  But I did overhear a pre-schooler say, "They're playing Scrabble!"  He had the kind of rapturous tone that you'd use when saying "They get to drink all the wine and eat all the chocolate that they want!"  I felt so lucky.

--If we played Scrabble with V. S. Naipaul, would he have better vocabulary words than we did?  Not likely!  Of course, vocabulary doesn't matter so much as the tiles that you get and the open lettters.

--If you want to read my thoughts on prayer as improv, head to this post on my theology blog.

All Our Plague Haunted Passions

Today marks the intriguing juxtaposition of two anniversaries.  On this day in 1981, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report reported a puzzling case of 5 young men, previously healthy, who were diagnosed with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), a very rare disease usually only seen in people with severely compromised immune systems. The young men were gay.

It was the first official notice of the disease that would become known as AIDS.  For the story from the point of view of someone who was there at every step, this Washington Post story by Dr. Anthony Fauci offers fascinating insights.

It's also the anniversary of the first personal computer hitting the market; on this day in 1977, the Apple II went on sale.  The Writer's Almanac post for today says,  "It came standard with 4 kilobytes of memory, game paddles, and a demo cassette with some programs on it. Most people used their televisions as monitors. The Apple II sold for about $1,300; today that same money will buy you an iMac, with 4 gigabytes — one million times the original amount — of memory, a sleek backlit 21-inch monitor, and a 2.7 gigahertz processor."

To me, these 2 developments have shaped my life like perhaps no other (although I could make a strong, similar case for birth control pills or penicillin).  On this day in 1981, I was 6 weeks away from my 16th birthday.  To be honest, on June 5, 1981, most of us wouldn't have heard the news about the new disease.  I heard murmurings in the subsequent year or two, but I don't remember really being cognizant of the disease for a few more years.  And then, it seemed impossible to think about anything else until we knew more about how the disease was transmitted.  It was terrifying to see healthy young men felled so quickly.

What scared me more, AIDS or nuclear annihilation?  I had more bad dreams about that mushroom cloud.  But in terms of an insidious threat that always seemed to whisper at my consciousness, AIDS would take that trophy.

Much like nuclear annihilation, AIDS too may seem to be vanquished, only to come back again in a scarier form.  Those of us with health insurance may have the luxury of seeing AIDS as a chronic condition, but diseases morph and change.

So do computers.  It's amazing to think of the limited power of those early computers and what they can do now.  I was always aware of the power of computers, since my dad was a computer programmer.  I came in 3rd place in my 8th grade science fair with my project that showed the progress from the vacuum tube to the transistor to the computer chip.  I even had a computer chip that my dad procured for me.  In 7th grade, my school had a computer on site (it was the size of a refrigerator lying on its side).  A group of us learned BASIC and tried to write programs.  I made the computer play Hangman--it was one of my prouder 7th grade moments.

Do you still see the potential in the computer or do you see it as a plague?  There are days that I'm tired of all the electronics that demand my attention.  But for more days, I'm thrilled with what I'm able to do with very little money.  I can make a movie and edit it.  I can create a CD of music and sell it far and wide.  Once upon a time, I couldn't store my whole dissertation on the hard drive of my computer and still have room for the programs that made the computer run.  Now I can store novel after novel, along with complete music libraries, every photo I've ever taken . . . the list goes on.  If I was willing to buy more electronics and gadgets, all that data would be more portable than I could have ever dreamed.

I like to think that I'm the master of my machines, and some days that's true.  Other days, I worry where this technological trail is leading us. But one thing history teaches us is that we can't go back. 

Can we learn from history?  I hope so.  The AIDS pandemic has taught us much about disease management and the changing climate will unfortunately give us many chances to use those lessons.  One of the things that gives me hope is that so many of us have access to information, thanks to our computers.  Maybe when the next plague sweeps the planet, we'll be ready to respond more effectively.

My Book Club Discusses "Jane Eyre" on Kathleen Woodiwiss' Birthday

Yesterday was the birthday of Kathleen Woodiwiss.  Once upon a time, in the halls of my high school, you'd see young women openly carrying and reading those books by Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers.  You could recognize the books by their lush covers:  plunging bodices, female heads thrown back (in ecstasy, one presumes), everyone's hair blowing beautifully.  I thought of myself as the discriminating romance reader:  I wouldn't read those books that had rape scenes and later the victim falls in love with her rapist, and they live happily ever after.  Kathleen Woodiwiss barely passed the test.

I thought of Kathleen Woodiwiss yesterday as my book club discussed Jane Eyre.  One of our members even asserted that the novel had nothing to do with love.  I will admit that all the men in the book left me a bit queasy--more than a bit in the case of St. John Rivers.  What a creep that man was.

Of course, Rochester wasn't much better with his various manipulations.  How much do we excuse in the name of love and passion?

As I reread Jane Eyre this time, the intensity of the passion surprised me.  I think of Jane as a sturdy woman alone in the world pluckily making her own way.  I don't remember it particularly as a romance novel, but all the elements are there:  lovers kept separate by all sorts of circumstances, a grand passion that overcomes all, the very elements of nature that represent the emotional turbulence of the characters.

I have written elsewhere on this blog about my reading experiences with Jane Eyre (here, here, and here).  I thought I hadn't read it since grad school, but I was wrong.  I read it in 2001, as I prepared to teach my FAU class of English majors.  I remember loving it.

After my experience with reading Anna Karenina a year ago and reading Jane Eyre this year, I'm wondering if my ability to read nineteenth century novels has disappeared.  I've been reading Nicholas Carr's The Shallows, and even before I read it, I had wondered what the Internet was doing to my brain. Have my reading tastes changed that much?  Did the parts of the book that frustrated me always annoy me, but I used to just skip right over them?

I was surprised by how much of the book we could have sliced right out, if we had been Charlotte Bronte's modern editor--huge chunks where characters tell us what we've already witnessed happening, where characters tell us in long paragraph after long paragraph about their emotional state.  I'm used to older books giving me lots of description that I don't really need.  This reading experience was the first time that I noticed the long chunks of monologue that tell us plot that we've already spent 50-100 pages reading for ourselves.

The modern novel is quite different.  Last night I read half of a much more modern novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, the book by Jean Rhys which gives Bertha Mason (Rochester's mad wife who spent much of Jane Eyre locked up in the attic) her voice and perspective.  What a delight to read that novel after slogging through Jane Eyre this week.

Of course, after Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea seems a bit underdeveloped, with shadowy characters who we never really quite meet, much less come to know deeply.  But what a use of setting to evoke a mood!

When I was younger, a teenager, I most responded to Jane's feeling plain and lonely.  As a reader approaching or at midlife now, I most responded to Jane's yearning for a life she didn't quite have yet.  I've always loved that Jane knew what she needed, and she wasn't willing to settle for less.  She knew what was good for her and what wasn't.  I found myself near tears when Jane found out about her inheritance, and I wanted to cheer when Jane realized she had family members whom she had already come to love.  Even though I knew that Jane and Rochester would live happily ever after, I found myself feeling an almost unbearable suspense when Jane returned to Thornfield Hall to find a burned husk left.

Ah, virtue rewarded!  If only life could be like a nineteenth century novel.  No, wait, I take that back.  If I was a character in a nineteenth century novel, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't deserve a happy ending.  Or would I?

Now there's an interesting parlor game:  transfer your modern life into nineteenth century novel terms.  Are you the virtuous character or the cad?  Will your virtue be rewarded or must you be punished?

The Week of Heavy Sighs

There's been much sighing in my house.  My spouse does much of his work from home, and when he's got deadlines, and he's pushing up against them, he lets out a massive sigh for every 3rd breath.

How do I know this?  When I'm working at home, our computers are across from each other.

Yes, it's not the cozy situation I envisioned.  When I was young, I loved stories of writers who shared lives in such intertwined ways, working in the same study, reading each other's rough drafts, cozy, cozy, cozy. 

That's not my life this week.  When my spouse is really neck deep in reports and e-mails, he'll start to mutter.  It's like sharing a study with a demon-possessed person.

Well, maybe not.  I suppose a demon-possessed person would be more violent, or have more spitting, or something.

Other people are having weeks of heavy sighs too.  Flooding in South Dakota, tornadoes in Massachusetts (really?  can it be?).  And that's the national scene.  You can probably come up with any number of heavy sighing happening in your local neighborhoods.

I try to tell myself that sighing is just a way of getting fresh air into the far reaches of the body.  Some days, I can believe that.

I wrote this poem a few years ago after a similar week.  It just appeared in the lovely journal Emrys, a journal which has changed shape and design completely since the last time they published a poem of mine.

Sigh

In your heavy sigh, I hear the sound
of glaciers melting drop by drop,
the crunch of the boot on the neck,
the whispered plotting of antibacterial-resistant staph
germs in a sterile operating room,
the creak of a joint
before it turns to the scraping of bone on bone,
the steady drip of every leaking piece
of plumbing that ever betrayed me.

Old Work, New Work, and How to Create a Set List

Years ago, I went to see REM when they toured to support Monster.  This was the tour where they warned fans that they wouldn't be playing much from their early years.

I enjoyed the concert immensely, but I did wonder if every time Michael Stipe pens a song, he pauses and asks himself, "Do I still want to be playing this song 20 years from now?"

Or does he just feel lucky that people will keep shelling out money to hear whichever songs they most want to hear?

I've wondered the same thing with poets.  I've noticed that the only poem of Carolyn Forche's that I ever see in anthologies for students is "The Colonel."  I've wondered if she ever says, "You know, I wrote that almost 40 years ago.  I've written good poems since."

Or is she thrilled to have her poem still appear in anthologies?

I have the issue of old work and new work on the brain because of a post I wrote on Voice Alpha.  On Tuesday, I wrote a post about creating a set list for your poetry reading, and this morning, I wrote a post about creating a set list if you you have more than one book.

I realize some of you might be saying, "More than one book?!!  I should be so lucky."  With persistence, you likely will be.

Those of us who are more prolific with our rough drafts will also have to consider when to give up on finding a home for older poems.  We might even have to consider when to take manuscripts out of circulation.  I don't have easy answers.  When so much depends on the preferences of one editor, and editors come and go, I tend to keep poems and manuscripts in circulation until I feel like they no longer represent my current literary interests.

Hurricane Season 2011

Today is the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season, which traditionally ends November 30.  Careful weather observers will point out the hurricanes that have formed outside of that time period, well into December.  Other observers will remember hurricanes that wandered into areas where we don't usually find them.  To all of you, I say, "Yup.  Prepare now."

Everyone I talk to down here in South Florida feels a bit nervous this year.  It's been awhile since we've had a truly dreadful year (2005).  But what makes us really nervous?  The severe weather across the rest of the country this year:  blizzards, floods, tornadoes.  It's hard not to feel the bullseye on our backs.

So, it's time to start eating down the food in the freezer, time to stop buying so much in quantity that requires electricity to stay good.  It's been a few years since I bought batteries:  time to do that.  Time to start picking up a few pantry items each time I shop; we're short of peanut butter, a staple I used to keep in multiple quantities when hurricanes were fresher in my mind.

I have to be honest, the water is the problem.  We lost water in 2005, and even though I'd stored the amount of water officials recommend, and even though we were parsimonious with our water usage, we ran out.  We were lucky.  Our water problem was localized, and once we found the leak, we could fix the pipe ourselves and restore water to the house.

I'm not too worried right now.  The sea temperature is not as hot as it will be.  Hurricane season almost never shifts into high gear until August.  Except for the 1996 season, where Bertha and Fran tore apart the North Carolina coastline in July.

Even if you don't live on the coast, it wouldn't hurt to make a few preparations.  I'm thinking of the residents of Sumter, South Carolina (roughly 90 miles inland) who had devastating losses when hurricane Hugo came ashore and just kept driving inland.  A few years ago, I had friends in Asheville, N.C. (inland and upland) who had a worse hurricane season than I did, when one of the huge Panhandle hurricanes (Dennis?) roared ashore and kept going.

Could you and your family survive if you couldn't get to a grocery store for a week or two?  You may scoff, but we're all increasingly reliant on food that's shipped to us from elsewhere.  What if an emergency elsewhere meant your grocery store couldn't get food?  We've experienced that before.  What if part of the electric grid went down?  Do you have batteries for your flashlights?  What if something happened to disrupt shipments of gasoline?  Do you have more than half a tank of gas in your car right now?

Until recently, most of us assumed that we lived in a world with stable, predictable weather patterns.  Surely no one believes that anymore.  Until recently, we assumed that our government could save us from anything that might go wrong.  Believe that at your peril.  At least realize that it might take awhile for your government to ride in to the rescue.  Could you eat in the meantime?

It's time to return to the idea of self-reliance.  Maybe you don't want to go as far as buying a generator or canning your own food.  Maybe you don't want a weapon to call your own.  But now is a good time to take stock:  count your supplies, take some pictures of your valuables, put those pictures with your insurance and other important paperwork.  You do know where those important papers are, don't you?  You could grab them at a minute's notice, if you had to evacuate?

And while we're at it, we should back up important papers and important pictures.  If you can't afford cloud computing, you can e-mail files to yourself.  Or put it all on a data stick and ask an out of town person you trust to hang on to it.  That way, even if you don't have access to your hard drive for whatever reason, you've got your important stuff.

Maybe I'll read Thoreau today.  Maybe I'll read Laura Ingalls Wilder and think about Pa, who could seemingly build a cabin in a week-end.  Self-reliance was once a proud tradition in the U.S.  It's time to return to it.