SuperWeed

Ecofeminist Greta Gaard’s remarkable essay “Explosion,” which I quoted a few posts ago, is now available in free full text online. I’m so happy to be able to share it!

Two paragraphs into my first reading of that essay, I bolted out of my chair and bounded around the house exclaiming, “This is so good! I don’t know what to do with myself!”

Two pages later, I was pacing and outbursting again: “This is so beautiful! How can somebody write something so beautiful?”

After several such energetic interruptions, one of which sent me outside to scatter treats for chickens and another of which sent me out to the back porch to calm down, I finally finished reading the piece. “I need to tell somebody about this,” I said while pacing up and down the hall, “How can I tell everybody about this?”

Answer to myself, days later: “Um, that’s why you have a blog.”

But then I hesitated, for fear that — since I know and love Greta — folks might think I was just trying to get them to buy the new book in which the essay had been reprinted. Now that it’s online for everybody, I can feel free to say: “Go read it now.” Seriously, besides modeling an ecofeminist understanding of the interconnectedness of all things and the intersection of oppressions, the essay is just an extraordinarily skilled piece of writing. It made me wish I were teaching writing rather than speech so that I could assign it to students.

Speaking of which, it’s back to school for me soon. More on that another day. Go. Read. Rather than hotlinking to the pdf, let me send you to Greta’s new website. Click on “essays and articles” and you’ll find that one along with a history of vegetarian ecofeminism, a theory of queer ecofeminism, and an analysis of the dynamics of cross-cultural feminist ethics.

Jill Johnston’s 1974 book, Gullibles Travels, was the travel guide by which I navigated my lesbian youth, its wild tales of psychedelic yet political queer debauchery providing the necessary female counterpoint to the boy-heavy tales of bar hopping told by the gay men in the makeshift family to which I fled from my biological family of origin. They taught me how to be fabulously gay. So different from the boys at the disco and also from the tradition-bound dykes at the local bars, Johnston offered me a model of truly transgressive lesbian identity.

So imagine my surprise, more than 20 years later, to find myself standing in my kitchen arguing with Jill Johnston about gay marriage. It happened like this: I noticed that a new lesbian webzine was using the name of Johnston’s most influential book (the 1973 Lesbian Nation) without any mention of the history of that phrase. I offered to write a profile of Johnston for the site and they countered by asking me to interview her too. And thus I found myself standing up in the kitchen, tethered to the tape recorder hooked to the telephone on the wall, struggling to stay cool as the anti-monogamist hero of my youth asserted gay marriage to be the issue, declaring those who (like me) worry about the inherently patriarchal nature of marriage to be “crazy” and “prejudiced.”

I shouldn’t have been surprised. In her heyday, Johnston was rather noted for the arrogance with which she asserted her positions. Her extremity was part of her charm even as it was aggravating. And, I’ve noted in the course of years of activism in different movements, those who charge forward with truly new ideas in the face of strong cultural opposition do tend to share a certain hard-headedness.

All of which is to say, I’ve just posted my 1999 profile of Jill Johnston, along with the unexpurgated transcript of the edited interview with Jill Johnston that accompanied it in my new text archive. Have a look! The profile may disabuse you of some stereotypes you might hold about lesbian feminists of the 60s and 70s. (Hint: There’s a lot more sex than you might expect.) And, once we got done arguing about gay marriage, Jill Johnston and I did get talking about some interesting ideas about how mother-daughter dynamics play out politically in relation to lesbianism.

I forgot to give the link for the blog for the Coming Out for Animals anthology. Besides serving as a reference point for potential anthology contributors and readers, the blog will be offering news and views related to the intersections among queer and animal oppression and liberation. It’s already loaded with links to relevant texts and websites. Check it out!

Call for Proposals

What do queer liberation and animal liberation have to do with each other? How does the construction of homosexuality as both “unnatural” and “bestial” hurt both people and animals? How are speciesism and heterosexism interrelated and how do they fit into the matrix of race-sex-class oppression? Why have both homosexuality and veganism been dismissed as “white things” beside the point of real liberation struggles? What are we going to do about homophobia among straight-edge vegans? About those dreadful gay rodeos? Should we be arguing for pleather or against sexual practices that mimic the subjugation of animals? What’s so sexy about whips, chains, and choke collars anyway? What do hip hop “video vixens” and activist “vegan vixens” have in common beyond the performance of animality for the heterosexual male gaze? How does vivisection hurt people with AIDS? Why, within the USA, are both the queer and animal liberation movements less diverse than they should be but portrayed as more white than they are? Why do queer activists in Uganda but animal activists in the USA bear the brunt of police suppression in their respective countries? Are they similarly subversive of “cultural” practices that turn out to be critical to the maintenance of state power? What keeps many gay men in the animal liberation movement from coming out? Why are so many lesbian potlucks vegetarian and what does this mean in the era of FBI infiltration of the vegan potluck?

Kim Stallwood is a writer and independent scholar living in East Sussex, England. He is the former executive director of PETA (1987-1992); former editor-in-chief of Animal’s Agenda magazine (1993-2002); former co-executive director (2002-2007) and current European Director of the Animals and Society Institute. He is the editor of two anthologies, Speaking Out for Animals and A Primer on Animal Rights, as well as a contributor to several other anthologies. Kim blogs at Grumpy Vegan and can be reached at kim (at) grumpyvegan.com

Art Pepper’s “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise” just played on my LastFM neighborhood radio station and I thought, “what other kind of sunrise is there?” That’s a good reminder for me as I work on revising two anthology contributions (one for an anarchist studies reader, the other for a collection of reflections by female animal advocates).

As George Orwell wrote in one of the most useful pieces of writing about writing: “If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.” As the often excessive verbosity of my blog posts demonstrate, I need to be more mindful of that rule.

My lengthy silence has had some people saying the title of one of my favorite mp3 blogs: Honey, Where You Been So Long?

I’ve been stuck at the intersection of Deadline and Nothing to Say on the writer’s block of a particularly bad neighborhood. I managed to slog through one overdue anthology chapter but then became immobilized in the middle of another. Like a fool, I stayed there, even though I ought to know by now that saying “no blog, no email, no writing anything else at all until this gets written” is a certain recipe for days and days of staring discontentedly at sentence fragments and jagged paragraphs as I fall further and further behind not only on the project in question but also on all of my other obligations other than teaching and animal care. Like Wiley sings in Treddin on Thin Ice, “it seems I don’t learn because I make the same mistake more than twice.”

Luckily, somebody called me and reminded me of something else I’ve been promising to write. The next morning I burst out of bed and began monomaniacally writing that other thing, the words pouring out like a cloudburst breaking a drought and the ideas flowing faster than I could get them down. Two days and twenty pages later, I’m ready to get back to that chapter and start making a dent in all of the things I’ve neglected while trying to write it.

We’ve just had a cloudburst at the sanctuary too, a lovely deluge that washed the pent-up pollen out of the air, which now carries the delicate scent of the rampaging wild roses just starting to bloom. The ducks were delirious during the downpour and continue to be thrilled by the swelled ponds. Now that the sun’s back out, the chickens are running around excitedly, catching up on the foraging they forwent while waiting out the rain.

I can’t spend long on this post because I’ve got literally thousands of spam messages to wade through in order to find my true email messages and heaven-knows-what-else to do to get back on track. But, before I go, let me tell you one thing that sometimes gets the words going and almost always keeps them flowing: The right music. If I can find the right music to match the mood of what I’m trying to write, then I’m halfway there, I guess because of the way it stimulates my brain. That means, sometimes, listening to the same song 25 times while writing one paragraph or, more often, listening to a cycle of songs that collectively capture the feel of what I’m trying to say.

Let me share with you three tools that help me to do that, also helping me to discover new music and make the most of the music I have:

1. MusicIP Mixer
I learned about this software in New Scientist magazine a few years ago and have happily used it ever since. Basically, the program constructs playlists based on the structural features of music. The version for individual use is free. After installation, it analyzes your mp3s (or AACs or whatever). Be patient. This takes a looooong time. Once it’s ready to go, you specify one or more tunes as the starting point of a playlist, choosing whether you want the list to have high or low variety in terms of kinds of music and whether or not the overall style of the artist(s) of the seed song(s) should be favored. The program then constructs a playlist of any length you choose, based on the structural features of the music. If you like, you can tinker with the the playlist before exporting it to your player of choice or listening directly from the mixer.

The very first time I used MusicIP Mixer I was amazed by the song it chose to follow the seed tune, which followed it perfectly although they were in two very different genres and I never would have thought to put them together. Besides regularly supplying surprises like that, this software helps me to make the most of my music by keeping me from slipping into ruts. Songs that I otherwise might have downloaded and forgotten pop up in playlists all the time. And it’s great at generating playlists that capture and reiterate the mood of an instrumental track, which is exactly what I need to keep the words flowing when I’m writing.

2. Pandora
Pandora is an online stream server associated with the Music Genome Project. Again, the emphasis is on the structural features of music but here these are used to create personalized “radio stations” based on one or more songs or artists. So, if you’ve got a song in your head and would like to hear music like that, you can start a station with it. Or, if you’d like to hear songs of a certain type, such as bebop in a minor key, you can seed the station with a few songs that fit the profile. Either way, once the music starts playing, you can give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to each song so that, over time, the station more and more closely matches what you want to hear. (I’ve got one station that plays nothing but Thelonious Monk or other artists playing Monk compositions, another that plays Parliament/Funkadelic-style funk, one that plays jazz-inflected hip hop, another that plays Delta blues, etc., etc.) You can choose to share your stations or keep them to yourself. Either way, you’re bound to discover new (to you) music along the way.

3. Last.FM
LastFM is a hybrid music discovery and social networking service. Unlike MusicIP Mixer and Pandora, both of which I’ve been happily using for years, LastFM is relatively new to me but I’m pretty pleased with it so far. Once you sign up, you can choose to “scrobble” the record of your listening to the LastFM server (obviously, not for you if you want to keep your listening habits private) which then maintains tallys of your top songs and artists. These are used to identify your musical “neighbors” (people with similar tastes) and generate personalized radio stations such as one that plays what your neighbors are listening to. Another great way to discover new music! Even if you don’t choose to scrobble your songs and get personalized stations, you can listen to stations of artists similar to your favorite artists and listen to tracks by individual artists.

I had to mention LastFM because there you will find the track that supplied the title for this post: Freddie Hubbard’s brilliant Up Jumped Spring. Since today’s another rainy day (I started this post yesterday) you might also want to check out his version of Here’s the Rainy Day.

Today is poetry day in my classes. Each student brings in and reads a poem of his or her choice. I teach speech and this is the time in the term when we are focusing on using language colorfully and concisely as well as aspects of delivery such as rhythm and vocal expressiveness.

In my first term teaching speech, I half-expected poetry day to be like pulling teeth (to use the kind of trite metaphor writers really ought to avoid) but it turned out to be a joyous day of creativity and self-expression. Some students brought poems they wrote themselves, bravely reading out anguished reflections that made their classmates wince in empathy or polished pieces that provoked whistles of admiration. Others brought in old favorites, like Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” (always chosen by at least one female student in every class). Even those who had clearly done the assignment at the last minute, scrambling to find a poem in an old textbook or on the internet, made some effort to choose a poem that expressed something about themselves or their view of the world. Now I know that poetry day will be one of the happiest days in class each term.

One year, a quite masculine young man brought in “Phenomenal Woman,” which he wanted to read because he liked what it said about Black women. I still remember women in the class echoing gleefully, “that’s me,” every time he read that phrase. (I teach at an HBC/U, so most of my students are African American or African.)

In another class, a young man read out a poem about your rifle being your best friend. This was a diffident young man whose previous speeches and class assignments all had something to do with explosives. His classmates called him “the boy who loves bombs” and viewed him with some trepidation, probably wondering (as I did) when it might be time to worry.

That day, after everyone read their poems, I invited comments on the exercise. After complimenting the love poems read by both male and female students, one bold young woman took a deep breath and went on to say that the poem about the rifle had scared her. “The boy who loves bombs” looked surprised and asked why, clearly really wanting to know. After hearing her explanation, he said that he didn’t really like that poem but it was the only one he knew, having been forced to learn it while in the Marine Corps. His answers to his classmates’ questions about basic training led us all into a discussion about what scholars call the social construction of masculinity.

Then we had to move on to the next scheduled exercise of the day, which just happened to be a fun little game in which the class decides how the phrase “Are you talking to me?” might be said by three different people (a hard-of-hearing old woman, a sarcastic young woman, and an angry young man) at a bus stop. For each of the people in turn, the class has to decide how the speaker stands and gestures as well as the emphasis and intonation of the words in the sentence and then, in unison, everybody has to stand up and say the sentence like that character. As they were impersonating the sarcastic young woman, I caught a glance at the theretofore stone-faced “boy who loves bombs,” laughing and laughing with his peers as they stood, each with arms akimbo and one hip jutting out, asking “Are you talking to me?” I’ll always remember that day because I wrote about it in my own journal, entitling the entry, “the boy who loves bombs gives us a smile.”

Instead of returning to his theme of munitions, that student gave his final speech on a wonderful trip he had taken to visit a relative in another country. He got a passing but not very good grade in the class, simply because of not turning in written work. The next year, I was surprised when he walked into my classroom again, having elected to re-take the class with me. Since he didn’t make any more of an effort to complete his written assignments, I can only conclude that getting a better grade was just the pretext for getting a little more time in a safe atmosphere where people try to use words truthfully to talk about things that are real, forging real relationships with each other in the process. (I did give him a better grade anyway.) And — oh — there were no speeches about guns, bombs, or fighting from him that second term.

Thus, the power of poetry day.

Often, after they’ve all read their poems, my students will ask what poem I’ve brought to read. I always have a few, just in case. Usually, I’ll read Audre Lorde’s “Litany for Survival,” which ends with this passage, which I find very appropriate for a speech class where many students come from dangerous neighborhoods here in the USA and some come from war zones in other countries:

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

Sometimes, if I’m in a mood, I’ll blow their minds by reading Ntozake Shange’s “with no immediate cause,” which begins with this gripping passage…

every 3 minutes a woman is beaten

every five minutes a

woman is raped/every ten minutes

a lil girl is molested

yet i rode the subway today

i sat next to an old man who

may have beaten his old wife

3 minutes ago or 3 days/30 years ago

he might have sodomized his

daughter but i sat there

cuz the young men on the train

might beat some young women

later in the day or tomorrow

…and goes on to become even more intense.

But here today, in honor of poetry day and the melancholy side of springtime, let me take a page from Noemi’s book and share one of my own poems, which I wrote a couple of years ago when — no, first the poem, then the story.

Rural Free Delivery

Somebody planted daffodils.
When? Now naturalized,
they run among rusted cars.

Petals of a black metal fan
still shimmer
within the forsythia.

How long?

At the time, I was reading an anthology of essays and poems by the past poets who called themselves imagists. I really liked the idea of imagism — image-focused poems expressed in concise yet lively language — although I didn’t think the poems in the anthology at all reflected the guidelines for such poetry given in the essays. I guess I was drawn to the idea of finding ways for images to speak because I had myself been more or less struck mute by the aggregation of jarring juxtapositions like those I wrote about in my last post. I kept seeing things, like the headless torso of a deer rotting in a drainage ditch by the side of the road, that provoked in me a complex mix of thoughts emotions that I was finding it difficult to express in prose.

This particular poem was provoked by the images it describes, daffodils that had rewilded themselves in an abandoned yard filled with junked cars and the gleaming black blades of a fan in the same overgrown yard. The rampaging flowers and insurgent “weeds” gave me hope but the persistence of the unnaturally shiny metal made me wonder longingly how long it will be before nature can deliver herself from our toxicity.