The debate, the debacle by ABC, the continued insatiable public need for gossip and inuendo as opposed to real meat and potatoes issues…. all of this is, I fear, about to put John McCain in the White House and ensure four more, perhaps even more, years of Republican warmongering and the continued destruction of our economy and the health of our country.

 I do wish Obama and Clinton could come to some terms and go after McCain….. who is, I fear, just soaking up the enmity and waiting until he can unleash it against whoever becomes the candidate.  This is surely the weirdest presidential race in my memory……

March 7, 2008

I have been promoting my anthology Desire: Women Write About Wanting since it came out from Seal Press in mid November.  Readings at KGB in New York, Rosemary Daniell’s Zona Rosa group in Savannah, and at  bookstores  and universities around Virginia,  as well as bookclubs in Virginia and Rhode Island, have brought some things home to me about writing, publishing, books, and what women want to read and will respond to.

The women (and the more than several men who have been at readings) have responded so positively to the essays that I wonder:  what is it that is being said in this book that isn’t being said elsewhere?  And why has it been so hard to get the media interested in a book like this?  A book different from anything on the market, yet one which speaks OUT LOUD to women from aged thirty through eighty!  I have also had extremely positive reviews by men and wonderful remarks from men in my Goodreads groups (goodreads.com).

 I wonder this even more in  light of the most recent publishing fiasco concerning the false memoir by Peggy Seltzer that managed to garner a fantastic review in the New York Times, coverage on On Point, and television interviews.  All for something that, while perhaps well-written (most of us will now never know) was completely and utterly fabricated by a woman who is either a sociopath or a pathological liar.

 While my book contains twenty three beautifully written, heartfelt and HONEST essays by women of many ages and many stages of life about their deepest and most revealing desires.  The desire for home, for place, for love, intimacy, money, sex, freedom, God, even a desire not to have desires…. you name it. 

Reader response has been profound with many readings or book club discussions ending up like early feminist consciousnes raising events:  each woman vying to tell her story, or wanting to say why one essay or another hit closer to home.

Katha Pollit got huge press for revealing her own “warts” publicly:  she was  both praised and villifiled.  But Pollit is famous so that helps.  What about other women, writers of note like Daniell, Jane Juska, Joyce Maynard, Melissa Pritchard (as well as many other writers not so “famous”) telling it like it is?  Seems to me that those stories are even more potent than Pollit’s who has had a regular place to vent for years.  Apparently hundreds of others feel the same way, as women I know are buying multiple copies and sending them to friends and relatives.  The true life (nothing made up there) essays in Desire are hitting a nerve.

 Would that the media were more interested in  good writing and good thinking on its own merit without the flash and glitter of fame or notoriety. Would that publishers were still interested in good ideas and good writing for its own sake without necessarily needing shock value.  Sure, a white kid raised by a black mother in the projects is compelling…but it could be just as compelling as fiction.  Reading blogs I found that many people seem put off by fiction, as though it isn’t quite as “serious” as memoir because it isn’t True.  Funny concept.  Hard to convince readers otherwise, I guess.  Memoir is wonderful, when done right, like The Glass Castle.  Otherwise, though, writers should write their own truth in the genre that lets them be the most honest….not the most sensational.

 This comes from Rachel Sarah’s blog. She’s a single mom and author of Single Mom Seeking, which looks like an interesting new book.  Check out her site at www.singlemomseeking.com

Single parents, you have another chance! This week, I’m giving away a copy of Desire: Women Write About Wanting, edited by Lisa Solod Warren.

“What do women want?” writes editor Warren on her website. “We want everything.”

In this collection of essays, Warren describes the intimacy she found only after leaving her first marriage. In “Still Horny After All These Years,” S.S. Fair drives home her point that sexual desire does not fade with age. “Desire has its own circulatory system,” she writes, and “as long as you’re upright and breathing, you’re riding its eternally recurring loop of lust and satiation.”

Thanks Rachel!!

Less than two weeks after my disappointment about Edwards bowing out, I find myself pulling, in a huge way for Hillary Rodham Clinton.  In my view, there is no real comparison between her and her competitor, Obama, although, as a yellow dog Democrat (and a citizen who is very very sad at the direction this country is taking) I will vote for any Democrat come candidate time.

HOWEVER…

It is clear to me that Hillary is geeting a very raw deal.  I wish that feminism were entrenched enough so that I didn’t have to encourage others to vote for Hillary because her being a woman has some import in that decision.  But, as much as I wish the world had really changed more than it has in the past forty years, I must admit that it is, alas, not.

White men are not voting for Hillary because she is a woman.  The young are more interested in charisma and feel good politics than in voting for someone who just might remind them of mom:  tough, no nonsense, smart, but….too old. Too…womanly.

 I don’t think Hillary is perfect.  She was not, in the best of all possible worlds, my first choice.  But now that we have whittled the field, she is the very best, most experienced option we have. 

But she has a long row to hoe to get beyond prejudices about smart, tough, independent women who don’t fit into any category anyone can get their head around.  I have seen terrible redneck bumperstickers about her being a bitch, I have heard comments that made me want to scream. 

I wish I could say I could change minds, but I doubt that I can.  All that I can do is vote for her in Tuesday’s primary and talk her up wherever I can, trying to get people to see beyond their own prejudices.  People think because they are voting for a black man, they’re cool.  All they’re proving is that they aren’t racist.  Still, however, sexism and misogyny prevail.

A lot of good pundits have written about Hillary, especially Erica Jong.  But for a new, good take check out:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/opinion/10kristof.html?ex=1360386000&en=6742716922585108&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

And with that defection I lose my enthusiasm for the race.  I don’t know why the Obama does not excite me, but he just doesn’t.  I will, of course, vote for him, or any Democrat, over any Republican.  And I do think change is necessary, that our country is moving in many many wrong directions, but I don’t feel confident that either of the two candidates left can get enough done. Perhaps I am just suffering from election coverage overload. I am willing to sit back and see what happens next.  But I’m not happy about it.

I am cutting and pasting this little gem, intact, from amazon.com….. A wonderful man, whom I do not know at all, posted this lovely review of Desire and I just had to share.

Ride this engaging “streetcar” to the very end, January 17, 2008
By Peter Blair

This collection of essays on desire is a beautiful and challenging ride through the multi-form manifestations that desire takes in the lives of women. From love and sex to success and acclaim to religion and the desire to help others (and even a desire for a kind of Zen “desirelessness”), I am impressed at the high quality of writing and the courage and candor these writers muster on the page. These are not merely sentimental, pornographic, angry, dreamy, or weepy essays (all of which are fragmented emotions). They seem to spring from a place of emotional maturity where the fragments have been merged by trials of living into that one elemental “emotion-which-contains-all-emotions” that is the “Desire” of the book’s focus. Reading them as a man, I’m taken with how the range of essays spans what poet Gary Snyder calls the three manifestations of the goddess: daughters, lovers/wives/friends, and mothers, and how the exigencies of each stage impact, imprint, or alter one’s desire in specific and moving ways or moments in time. It’s so hard to write well about sex, yet Fair, Bussel, and Baechler, for instance, create witty, graphic, and unapologetic characterizations of physical love. Baechler’s essay wonderfully reveals our desire to push the limits of taboos during sex in viable and non-violent ways. It skillfully portrays the roles of fantasy and experimentation in our desire for physical expression and release. Daniell’s essay reminds me of Lawrence’s image of marriage as a binary star where the stars must remain in delicate balance or one will be subsumed into the other or one may fly off into space forever. The essays about motherhood by Oxnard and Leiter reveal the desire for creation of life itself and how age and circumstance affect it. Finally, Bucholt’s essay about the death of a dear friend shows the awe-inspiring and awful heights of emotion we go through in our desire to understand the soul and the injustice of losing someone we love. This is a moving collection.

Polls you won’t  hear about in the mainstream media!  Why has Edwards disappeared?  Because the media has “disappeared” him–effectively ruling him out, covering only Obama and Clinton and making us think there are no other viable candicates.  And gullible voters believe it and vote accordingly.

 http://firedoglake.com/2008/01/14/the-polls-you-wont-hear-much-about/

We need to win this thing.  We need to take our governement back from the Republicans who have stolen our money, our civil liberties, our honor, and our future.

John Edwards for president. We need information, we need to make up our own minds, and we need to vote what and who makes the most sense.John Edwards for president.

I went to a spiritual advisor/channeller the other day.  It was quite an experience.  Although my husband says that they use “tells” like one would in poker or an interrogation, to try and suss out the person, and ask questions that can then be go a myriad of ways, I was impressed.  Like a recent horoscope, it was dead on.  Didn’t tell me things I didn’t know about myself, necessarily, but told me things I knew to be true, but I didn’t think others did.  And stressed how to handle my life, which I have been somewhat less than successful doing lately. Not that I’m not trying, but I allow myself to spend too much of my time taking care of others and too little taking care of myself.  When I got divorced in January of 2005 I made a vow that I would put myself on the list of things to do, not at the top, but at least on the list.  I was pretty good at it for awhile….but then I guess I lost the list:)

So I need to make another and put myself farther up.  I am a natural care-giver (there is a long history to that), which is somewhat unusual for a Capricorn, but I also possess the other  traits of a Cap, so given perseverence, self knowledge, and a good pulling up of my own bootstraps, I ought to be able to learn to say No to others sometimes, and Yes to myself….and get back to the work of my own writing, which has gotten short shrift for a variety of reasons.

The thing is I really am happy when I am working well.  Not writing makes me jittery, depressed, morose….. and it feeds on itself, so that I become paralyzed.  Finishing the book was a great thing, but promoting it has taken up a lot of time and I am not taking more time to write:  rather I am just trying to fit in the stuff of ordinary life and the writing gets way down on the the list.

The list of Me means I gotta write every day.  Even if it’s no good.

So…off I go.

According to Bob Herbert’s latest column http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/opinion/04herbert.html?ex=1354510800&en=667b49a4ec418faa&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
we are bankrupting ourselves with this war. Well, duh, you might saw….but we keep doing it, and getting ourselves deeper and deeper in a debt hole with other programs, like health insurance for the poor, deemed too expensive.

We MUST keep trying to work on our legislators to get back on track. The Christian Science Monitor in its November 15th issue states that economists project that the cost of the Iraq war “when all is said and done, will come in at $1 trillion or more.”

That is astonishingly scary. The article goes on to envision that same (or another) trillion dollars spent on things that benefit humanity and suggests that The Next Trillion be spent thusly:

“$250 billion for clean energy and energy efficiency
$250 billion for carbon sequestration and bioremediation
$250 billion for sustainable food and forests and
$250 for community development”

All to benefit the entire global community.

I can think of other places for $250 billion, too: Universal Health Care, Education improvement, Literacy programs, heating oil subsidies for the poor, debt relief for those undergoing foreclosure (but not the real estate speculators), and medical research that does not involve lab animals….. that’s for a start.

It’s actually hard for me to imagine what $250 billion could do, which is, I think, because our government throws those kinds of dollar amounts around as if they were talking about the tens and twenties in our wallets. Most of the people in the United States think of money in much smaller terms, and in terms of how it will help us pay our every day bills.

A trillion dollars. Amazingly scary.

Other news items that have not received enough press:

The poor in New England (Maine in particular), according to a NYT article on November 24, are unable to heat their homes even to a barely livable temperature. In Washington County, Maine, the povery rate among those 65 or older is nearly one in five. The times adds that “many more live only a little above the federal subsistence standard in 2007 of $10,200 for a single person and $13,690 for two.”
The article goes on to interiew people in the seventies and eighties who will not be able to fill a single tank, even with subsidies, since the price of oil has skyrockted. People turn on their heat for only part of the day, stay inside wrapped in blankets, and rely on others to help feed and care for them. These are the working poor, now “retired” who look forward to spending their last years cold, hungry, and scared.
This in America.

And in Washington D.C> in an article from November 9, the Washington Post reports that many many schools student activity funds have “disappeared,” with few being punished for that disappearance. After students spend huge amounts of time selling candy or calendars or whatever, the monies raised (which should be going for the “extras” our school systems can never seem to afford) gets “lost” somehow…put into accounts that are then pilfered and stolen from by school officials.

These student activity funds take in as much as $6 million annually, says the Post. Some schools have small amounts, but some, with bequests from graduates or major fundraising, can hold a half a million dollars. “But,” says the Post, “in school offices throughout the city, employees handle cash, checks and records so haphazardly that money easily disappears.”

There are rules (theft insurance, accountability) but few schools follow them. And the icing on the cake? “Many business managers and principals entrusted with student money have problems with their own finances. Public records show that nearly one-forth of the more than 400 people who have listed in school and city records as business managers or principals since 2003 have experienced personal bankruptcies, judgments or lawsuits over unpaid bills, foreclosures, liens or wage garnishments…”

Talk about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse!!!!!!!

The reading went wonderfully and we were a huge hit… six of us read bits from our essays and that really showed how diverse the book was. The audience really responded, I sold books, and it was great fun.  Did a telephone interview with a reporter from the Staunton News Leader and that interview is out today, in anticipation of my reading at The Bookstack tomorrow…..