quote of the day
“Analysis cannot encourage in women new energies for success and achievement, but only teach them the lesson of rational resignation.”-Freud
This quote is from the article “The Psychology of Women” where Freud posited the wildly inaccurate and historically damaging myth of female frigidity. The cure for frigidity? Acceptance by women of their inferiority to men through intense psychiatric analysis.
None of this is new information, of course. I’m only plagiairizing what Anne Koedt wrote in “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” This was published in 1970, around 60 years after Freud published his theories.
I keep hearing over and over that those days are over, that Freud is the past and feminism was successful and lets all just move on. Some people I love most in the world say this to me.
But it simply isn’t true.
Filed under Feminism & Politics | Comment (0)flutterings
It is late and I’m suffering insomnia again. But this time I decided to be productive and finish the Rocky Votolato review I’m writing for Seattle.net. (Deadlines pass me by these days like so many moths on the wind.)
But I’m pleased to say I’m not alone tonight. Niblo has been fluttering away in my belly, stretching and kicking and generally restless.
Writing has never been less lonely.
Filed under As a Writer..., The Details | Comment (0)meg baird: dear companion
Things were going pretty well between me and NewPages.com. We’d agreed to start working together on expanding their website to include indie music, and I was so eager I wrote two reviews right off the bat. Sad to say, it seems our affair was short-lived. Just like my first high school boyfriend, one day they simply stopped calling.
So before the reviews I wrote are completely irrelevent, I’m going to post them here. First up, Meg Baird’s Dear Companion:
MEG BAIRD: DEAR COMPANION
Released on Drag City Records May 2007
By Jessica Star Rockers
Moving from freak folk to sweet folk isn’t a stretch for Meg Baird. Even on the Espers second album, the psych folk band she co-founded with Greg Weeks & Brooke Sietinsons, you can hear Baird as the calming sweetness to balance Week’s drone harmonies and psychedelic sound experiments. On Dear Companion, her debut solo album from Drag City, Baird strips away the thick instrumental arrangements and produces an album so austere, you’d think you were sitting on Baird’s back porch listening to her play to the cornfield. Buffy Sainte Marie’s old brown dog comes to mind. But that’s just what makes this album great. Recalling Vashti Bunyan and Sibylle Baier, Baird’s reverence for the unmuddled calls attention to itself. The woman isn’t hiding behind false vinyl clicks or forced reverb. And she makes you wonder, when did embracing tradition become so revolutionary?
All but two of the songs are covers of time-honored – and thankfully somewhat obscure – folk songs. These covers are stark and somehow rich simultaneously, owed in part to their lyrical beauty and the power of Baird’s vocals. But on “Riverhouse In Tinicum” and “Maiden in the Moor Lay”, the two written by Baird, she quiets herself down so deeply you might miss their brilliance if you weren’t looking for it. But like most good music, it improves with repetition. The songs are enchanting, and they connect Baird’s love of tradition with her progressive success.
The purists who heard Espers and ran for solace under their mountain dulcimers will emerge for this album, grateful for the straightforward folk. But the freaks will find much to love here, as well. If only to take a lesson as to how folk revival went from Anne Briggs to Joanna Newsom. It wasn’t an accident. And Baird gives a beautiful glimpse of her own journey
Filed under As a Writer..., Medium of Sound | Comment (0)in the realms of the unreal
Yesterday I joined the Democratic Socialists of America.
Today someone witnessed a strange man taking photographs of my car.
It is Friday the 13th.
I just finished watching the documentary about Outsider artist Henry Darger.
I will not sleep well tonight.
Filed under Feminism & Politics, Folk Art | Comment (0)15 weeks
I’m not posting the photo of my belly. It was taken in a moment of weakness and mostly for my own amusement, so I could get some sideways perspective on what’s happening to my midsection. Take my word for it, I’m starting to show.
According to the website Babycenter.com, the baby is about the size of my fist. Yesterday I went to the doctor and she found the heartbeat, which was strong and steady. WD’s face lit up the way it did at the first ultrasound. It’s good to have reassurances that Niblo is still in there, still coming along.
Next month we find out whether it’s a boy or girl.The whole thing is still very strange.
and my father said girls have it easy
Baby survives being buried alive
(posted today on South Asia BBC News)
A two-day-old baby girl in India has survived after being buried alive in a field by her maternal grandfather in the south of the country.
The baby, who had apparently never been fed, was discovered by a farmer near a village some 150km south of Hyderabad.
He said he only spotted her because her tiny hand was sticking out of the soil.
Police say they have arrested the baby’s grandfather, 52-year-old Abdul Rahman, after he confessed to trying to kill the newborn by burying her alive.
“I am yet to marry off four daughters and cannot take responsibility for a fifth one, even when she is only a granddaughter,” Mr Rahman was quoted as telling police.
It was not immediately clear whether Mr Rahman’s daughter, the mother of the baby, had given her consent for her child to be taken away.
The baby, who has not yet been named and weighs just 1.7kg, is being treated in a nearby hospital.
The practice of female foeticide and female infanticide does occur in some rural areas.
A girl child is often viewed as inferior to a boy and a bride’s dowry can also cripple a family financially.
Government figures suggest that around 10 million girls have been killed by their parents - either in the womb or immediately after birth - over the past two decades.
Filed under Feminism & Politics | Comment (0)
