Day 11: Ellen Gilchrist, Ursula K Le Guin, Joy Ladin
Ellen Gilchrist - Revenge
I love tricksters and cheeky buggers, especially any story narrated by a trouble-maker child. The handful I have read have all been about boys, but this one has a wonderful little girl protagonist who enacts revenge on the boys for not letting her play on the high-jump equipment.
I love it because it is not written for children, but shows how petty and vicious children can be:
"I began to pray the Japs would win the war, would come marching into Issaquena County and take them prisoners, starving and torturing them, sticking bamboo splinters under their fingernails. I saw myself in the Japanese colonels office, turning them in, writing their names down, myself being treated like an honoured guest, drinking tea from tiny blue cups like the ones the Chinaman had in his store.
They would be outside, tied up with wire. There would be Dudley, begging for mercy. What good to him now, his loyal gang, his photographic memory, his trick magnet dogs, his perfect pitch, his camp shorts, his Baby Brownie camera.
I prayed they would get polio, would be consigned forever to iron lungs. I put myself to sleep at night imagining their laboured breathing, their five little wheelchairs lined up by the store as I drove by in my fathers Packard, my arm around the jacket of my blue uniform, on my way to Hollywood for my screen test."
Its so fun, and apparently the narrator is a recurring character throughout Gilchrist's fiction. I can't wait to read more.
What is crazy is last week I had just finished writing a story in a very similar vein, about an ungovernable 13 year old boy at cadet camp. I read this today and it is essentially the same story. How about that!
Ursula K Le Guin - A Left-handed Commencement Address
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/lefthand-mills-college
I have been listening to a free audiobook of Le Guin's essays she wrote throughout the late 70s and 80s called Dancing at the Edge of the World. I loved all her book reviews, though her essays do get a bit repetitive.
I love her ethical philosophy that informs almost everything she writes: of a feminism mixed with Taoism (read: non-violence and non-interference). I think her philosophy is in its best, most concentrated form, in this university graduation speech, a speech that had me sitting up straight, on the verge of tears.
Maybe we’ve had enough words of power and talk about the battle of life. Maybe we need some words of weakness. Instead of saying now that I hope you will all go forth from this ivory tower of college into the Real World and forge a triumphant career or at least help your husband to and keep our country strong and be a success in everything - instead of talking about power, what if I talked like a woman right here in public? It won’t sound right. It’s going to sound terrible. What if I said what I hope for you is first, if — only if — you want kids, I hope you have them. Not hordes of them. A couple, enough. I hope they’re beautiful. I hope you and they have enough to eat, and a place to be warm and clean in, and friends, and work you like doing. Well, is that what you went to college for? Is that all? What about success?
Success is somebody else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.
It continues at this level for quite a while, and I really recommend you to read or listen to it.
Joy Ladin - Living in the Past
This poem is not online, so I will post the poem here for future reference:
A really beautiful and bittersweet poem about the speaker's golden years with a lover in San Francisco 1982-1992, also the period of the AIDS crisis, which shadows every stanza of the poem.
My phone just force-updated, restarting and deleted everything I had written about this wonderful poem!!! Then it had the nerve to tell me "Your phone just got better". Agh.
Well, "a letter always reaches its destination" says Lacan, and I hate that I am referencing him, but sometimes the French metaphors are apt. I write these for some invisible Other in the sky.