Taking Down the Patriarchy

Ocean Park Beach
photographer: Carl Jackson

I've been reading Nobel Prize winning writer Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. Yeah, light reading. Just kidding. I'm reading it in Russian, too. Just kidding. Actually, I'm not into the light reading thing. Light reading makes me feel anxious and depressed, seems to exacerbate my feelings of there never being enough time to read all the books. I feel the same about movies. Reading "light" or watching crap makes me want to throw myself in front of a train. Getting through my days, sometimes, is only possible because of the art of others. Right now, speaking of trains, I'm listening to Anna Karenina in the car as I drive around the shitty. Dang, ya'll. That novel is relevant, and it's not about throwing oneself in front of trains. It's about love and bullshit, about peasants and patriarchy. There's even a passage about doctors and their uselessness that yours truly could have written!

Reading the extraordinary accounts of survivors in Alexievich's book doesn't just give me perspective but highlights just how resilient and dogged and strong, human beings can be, not to mention black-humored (the best humor, at least to me). The oral histories aren't for the faint of heart, though, as you can imagine. They're as much about vulnerability as they are about strength, and that's why, I think, they appeal to me. I have been feeling particularly vulnerable and fragile of late, for obvious reason. Not a day goes by that I don't have some sort of fantasy of fleeing in either body or mind or both, and whether it's because of the poisonous political atmosphere (don't pose false equivalencies to me: #Imwithher), or the thought of living in the same country with those who support or make excuses for you-know-who or struggling with caregiving and Sophie's epilepsy, acknowledging that vulnerability and fragility restores me. Really great literature -- whether it's fiction or non-fiction or poetry -- restores me. Not long ago, a relative accused me of having my head up my ass as far as my politics go. I think she was also pretty disdainful of the poetry that I put up here. I really don't think it's one or the other. For me, the personal is political and the political is personal and the only mitigation is art.

I got distracted. I was going to make this post about my optimistic feeling that despite all the acrimony in the country, I honestly think the patriarchy is coming down. It might be messy, and it might get even messier, but it's coming down.

Here's some "poetry" from Alexievich's book:

Bulgakov writes in A Cabal of Hypocrites: "I've sinned my whole life. I was an actor." This is a consciousness of the sinfulness of art, of the amoral nature of looking into another person's life. But maybe, like a small bit of disease, this could serve as inoculation against someone else's mistakes. Chernobyl is a theme worthy of Dostoyevsky, an attempt to justify mankind. Or maybe the moral is simpler than that: You should come into this world on your tiptoes, and stop at the entrance? Into this miraculous world...

Aleksandr Revalskiy, historian 

War And

I've set myself the goal of reading a chapter a day of Tolstoy's War and Peace, and given that there are 365 chapters in the novel and 365 days in a year, I should hopefully have finally finished the tome on December 31st. I attempted to finish it before my 50th birthday, two years ago, but as the summer progressed, I got mired in the battle scenes and just couldn't do it. I figure I can read a battle scene if it's just a chapter's worth, and the other stuff -- the drama, the characters, the intrigue and romance and cold Russian sexism -- is pretty darn riveting. So watch that little mermaid tail bookmark sink, and if anyone wants to join me, the first seven chapters are short and interesting, so you can catch up by tomorrow.

Anyone?

Anyone?

Rolling around with Tolstoy

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious of truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues , which they have proudly taught to others and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

Tolstoy

I love that quote -- have been rolling it round and round in my mouth (I wish I spoke Russian!) as I go about my day. It pertains to the growing debacle in Iraq, and it pertains to the federal re-scheduling of medical marijuana and it pertains to our recent discussion of special education and private/public schools. It pertains to my earlier lament about Sophie's summer school location and this article I read today about the biggest house in Los Angeles being built, a whopping 85,000 square feet, valued at $150 million dollars.

Roll it around, baby, roll it around.

And P.S. One of my seesters reminded me that it also pertains to the NRA and 2nd Amendmenters and their inane arguments against gun control.

Self-Absorption, Tolstoy, Mark Twain and Happiness

Leo Tolstoy and his wife, Sonya Behrs

I really couldn't have that picture of myself yesterday at the top of the blog anymore. Imagine what people would think if they hadn't been here before? The fact that I also posted a photo of myself in a Tinky Wink costume on Facebook must mean something other than complete self-absorption. The truth is that I feel a little crazy of late, like I'm closer to tipping off the edge than doing the customary pirouette. Surrendering to humor, to self-derision is probably just a defense. Behind all humor is sorrow, said Mark Twain, and I believe that. I flip the date on my Alhambra Poetry Calendar and read a poem called Nihilism that has entirely too many explanation points after words like gloom and tomb and hollow. It made me feel like shit, and I'd rip it off the calendar, light a match to nihilism and watch it burn into the blue sky of Los Angeles if I didn't feel a modicum of respect for Mr. Lionel Johnson who lived a short thirty-five years in the late nineteenth century. Here's the final stanza of his poem:

For all the things I do, and do not well;
All the forced drawings of a mortal breath:
Are as the hollow music of a bell,
That times the slow approach of perfect death.

Good lord, the drama! I like to imagine that living in another century I would have taken to bed with a draught of laudanum on days like today -- and yesterday, and the day before. Or I might have been in attendance to a great bearded writer, ministering to his own dramas, bearing his thirteen children and secretly aware that his fame was completely dependent on myself.

Yes, I'd say, as he picked up his quill, yes. All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Reading at The Hotel California

So, summer is in full swing around here, and we're in pajamas until noon and also feeling guilty that we're not at the beach or outside or something. I'm going to have to call the kabosh on reading War and Peace. I just can't. I thought about hauling it to Canada next week, but my hardback copy of Colum McCann's new novel Transatlantic is far more seductive. The thing is, I'm having a very hard time even reading the Russian names in War and Peace, and even harder the vast passages of military -- well -- stuff. I am skimming those vast passages, much as I did the ones about the physiology of the whale in Moby Dick, and I keep waiting for the good stuff to happen, for romance to flourish or for some Russian pathos to evolve. Quitting it nearly two months before my fiftieth birthday gives me time to maybe pick it up again, doesn't it? I am a fickle lover, I suppose, and like I said Colum McCann is crooking his seductive Irish finger at me, as well as Edna O'Brien. I might just want to take the cigarette out of her pretty mouth and take a drag on it myself. I think an Irish menage a trois is far preferable to flying a Russian solo, don't you?

Reader, what are you reading?

Drinking and Anna Karenina

Tolstoy

I've been drinking more lately. I'm one of those people who has never been a drinker, despite the pleadings of some of my friends who insist that drinking a glass of wine a night would be good for me. When I took them up on the recommendation, I wanted to go to sleep at around 9:00 and therefore discovered the secret to why I am able to write and read into the wee hours of the morning, as opposed to my more "exhausted" friends. The other day, I bought a bottle of Kahlua at Trader Joe's because I remembered how good it tastes, but I haven't opened it up yet. Two nights ago, I had a pomegranate mojito before dinner, a glass of sauvignon blanc with my moules frites and a shot of vodka at my friend's house after dinner. Last night, I had a glass of wine with my dinner and contemplated a Blue Moon when I got home. I saw a movie, too, last night -- Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I remember reading the book in my late teens when I was totally into Robert Ludlum and John Le Carre spy novels. I don't remember being confused when I read the novels, but last night I was completely befuddled by the movie and so was my really smart friend Shannon. We laughed about it over our wine and dinner, and I even looked up a plot summary online afterward.

Oh! Now I understand!

I'm reading Jeffrey Eugenides' book The Marriage Plot, and while I was so excited to open and read it, I'm now in that exasperated slog phase when I should just give up and put it down, bored to tears, but I feel obligated to finish it. This seems to be happening more and more lately -- I feel like I haven't read a novel in years that I connect to with joy and wonder. The last really great book I read was the memoir The Boy in the Moon. A fellow bookworm told me that I should re-read Anna Karenina, so that's what I'm going to do.

Remember the famous opening lines?

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Who is writing like this anymore?

Would it be too much to add a shot of Kahlua to my morning coffee? Or should I start reading Tolstoy with a shot of frozen vodka?

Tolstoy at the bookstore

Tolstoy and his wife, Sofya

I had stormed out of the house, the other night, miffed and annoyed and needing a break. And damn if I didn't jump in the car, the decidedly unsexy, unfreedom-like car, without my cellphone because who cares if they get nervous and wonder where I've gone and whether I'll be all right and I certainly couldn't go back inside and get the phone, I'd lose my face so I drove and drove some more. I grabbed a copy of The Best American Essays, edited by Christopher Hitchens in the Barnes and Noble and took the escalators (why so much glamour in a bookstore?) up twice to the coffee cafe and there I ordered an iced tea and a dried up scone in a paper bag and sat down to read and continue saving my face. I read the first essay The Murder of Leo Tolstoy and quickly lost my way in it, laughing aloud, wondering who the writer Elif Batuman was and then remembering that I'd downloaded her book onto my Kindle months, if not years ago. My God, it was good, I thought and I was happy to be away, reading something weird and wonderful and when I got to the last page I looked up and saw a man come shuffling into the cafe, not a homeless sort of man but an old man, nonetheless, and it seemed so strange that late at night to see such an old man in a bookstore cafe wearing a tan Mr. Rogers cardigan with a dress shirt and pressed navy slacks (not pants, but slacks) and belt and white, sensible sneakers with thick soles and a balding head, a few strands of white hair falling over large half/aviator, half/square glasses, carrying 2 white plastic bags stuffed with something, I didn't know and a copy of Merriam Webster's Dictionary and a Glamour magazine. Had I conjured him? He ordered and paid for a coffee while I continued to read about Tolstoy's wife and their thirteen children and whether she had indeed killed him, she couldn't take it anymore, I suppose, and those crazy, crazy Tolstoyans who lived around their master, creating a cult and taking everything he wrote away from her but then he wrote Anna Karenina, a desperately dramatic novel about another crazy woman who so wanted to save face that she jumped in front of a train, and who doesn't love some Anna Karenina? and then the old man did nothing strange so I grew bored with him and finished my tea and left my place, scone crumbs on the small, round table and went home.