An Attack on Satire

Writing is big.

Writing is important.

People died today because they were writers.



I remember learning what satire was during my sophomore year in college.  We were assigned "The Rape of the Lock" by Alexander Pope, a poem that I still love and think about to this day.  In it, he talks about the artificial "beautifications" the aristocratic women applied every day.  He talked about how their wigs hid mice and other vermin.  He talked about the yellow stains of their undergarments.  He talked about the powders and the oils and the corsets and the odors - oh did he talk about the odors.  It is a lengthy poem and one that is full of many gems and garish detail and many mocking allusions to the upper classes of the society in which he was living and working.  I sometimes think to myself that I am perpetuating that same understanding of "putting on one's face" before I leave the house.  I've been told that I don't wear any makeup - or they notice when I have put on a little bit more eye shadow than normal.  In truth, it takes about twenty minutes to apply the undereye concealer masking the circles I have been cursed with since the tender age of twelve, the evening powder that hides any imperfections and smooths out sun damages, scars, etc.  We put on deodorant, hairspray, mascara, hair extensions, lipstick, lip gloss, whiten teeth, bronze forehead and cheekbones and collar bones and dab perfume.  All a mask - all a costume - all an elaborate rouse for the day.  I think about Mr. Pope even now and again as I go through my own "soft Transition," so that "we repair" all of the damages done the night before.

For those of you that might not know, the ol' Oxford English Dictionary defines "satire" as:

"The use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues."

Today, in France, twelve people died at the hands of Islamic extremists who had taken offense at the satirical drawings and articles about Muhammad and their religion.  Ten of them were staff at Charlie Hebo, a French newspaper that had suffered many other threats and attacks for their work previously.
Seeing this breaking story on the televisions hung above the cardio equipment at my gym as Spotify blared a random playlist titled "HIIT Workout" I was shocked and dumbfounded.  Even now, I cannot bring to mind any other violent attacks such as these in the past other than perhaps John Lennon.  I cannot understand or comprehend the desire to kill another human being based upon a cartoon drawing in a magazine with less than 200,000 subscribers.  I had not even heard of Charlie Hebo before this morning and I doubt many others around the world had not either.  But I guarantee that they will know the name now.  They may not remember it, another flashy story or tragedy or injustice will take its place in a month or a week or perhaps even tomorrow.  But this story struck me personally.

They were writers.

They were working on something that they believed in and doing it for very little money and a great deal of danger and risk.  Here in America and there in France, we no longer have the very real threat of censored reading, writing, living, believing.  We can pretty much do and say and think whatever we want as long as it isn't hurting anyone.  There is no Gestapo around the corner waiting for us after we have said what we think about Obama or Miley Cyrus (did I even spell her name right?  I don't care.)  However, today's massacre stands as a reminder that words have meaning.  Work and words and writing has value.  We are not here for long, there is no guarantee, but believe in what you do.  Stand up for it.  Leave your mark and waste no time.  There will always be those that are offended or enraged or become violent because of what you say and think and do.  But that shouldn't stop you - because it might offer some liberation and bravery to others that had not thought to speak up before they heard your voice.

Here's to speaking up.

Here's to those who fell this morning in a board room, probably joking around, drinking stale coffee and brainstorming on new ways to be clever and meaningful and informative.

Here's to the one's who were not afraid.

"Je n'ai pas de gosses, pas de femme, pas de voiture, pas de credit. C'est peut-etre un peu pompeux ce que je vais dire, mais je prefere mourir debout que vivre a genoux."

"I don't have children, nor a wife, nor a car, nor credit. This may be a bit pompous, what I'm about to say, but I'd rather die standing that to live on my knees."

-Stephane Charbonnier

This is a Poem about Distraction

It is 11:20 and I just woke up.

I wasn't even up that late.

I take the dog for a walk.

Boil some water
slice a lemon.

I go to the gym have breakfast read three chapters of Hemingway walk in walk out of Lush without buying anything head home sit at my computer and scroll through Facebook for an hour.

It is 3:58pm.

I take the dog for another walk.

I decide to shower, it'll make me feel better and maybe I'll go out and get a cup of coffee maybe that will help me write maybe that will inspire me.

Start a load of laundry.

Balance checkbook.

Feed the dog.

I get comfortable in front of laptop.

I get up again and get bottle of water.  I'm way behind.  Need to drink another 64 ounces.

Why did I sleep so late?

Look up favorite website on short fiction.  Hope it inspires.  Wonder if I should go to that coffee shop.

No.

Too much traffic.

Too much time wasted getting there getting comfortable figuring out the wifi password ordering a latte finding the right music settling on something to write about.

No.  I'll stay

home.


Check text sent from friend.  Wonder if I'll go see friend at work and get a glass of wine later tonight?
That would be nice.

I'd have to do hair and makeup.

Thirty

more

minutes.

Open three different working documents.

Nothing feels interesting enough to work on.

It is 5:25pm.

This is a Poem about Frustration

This is a poem about Frustration

it begins and ends

without

a resolution.

I just want

something

tomeansomethingtomattertoworkouttoendupalright

I wish there were

less

people everywhere I go.

THEY took away my bag at the bookstore.

THEY said it fights theft.

I take out my notebook and wallet and laptop and resignation and hand them my empty bag.

"Does this really cut down on theft?"

She tells me statistics that I don't care about.  I can't figure out
who
I
am
more
upset
with.

Her                               or                                         myself.

I was the one that

asked

if the bag was

too

                                                                                                                     big.

It's all my own fault.

I chose this

p       l                a                 c               e.

I thought it would give me enough

room

to

breath.

But it did the

e t i s o p p o

My jaw hurts.

I bet its from the clenching.

Or from my wisdom teeth that are not wise and are needing

to

come

out.


This poem is about Frustration.

Never Again

I will never again be thirteen at summer camp after my mother battled my way into going a year early because I skipped a grade.  I will never be left out like I was there, some of the counselors taking pity on me and talking to me while all the others flirted and played cards and talked about life back home.  But most of the counselors treated me like I didn’t belong there either. I pretended to be asleep when the boys came into the girls’ room one night and sprayed shaving cream all over our bunks and bathrooms.  I lied incredibly still as a boy duct taped me to my bed, pretending to be asleep.  I didn’t want to give anyone else an excuse to hate me.  Near the end of one of the worst weeks of my life, I attended an assembly where various religious leaders and random people got up and talked about their experience with Jesus Christ.  I chose my seat, trying not to intrude or invite myself to sit next to people that didn’t want me to sit next to them.  I listened to a particularly large girl talk about a dream she had about Jesus.  She said she was lonely and depressed growing up throughout most of high school and college.  According to her, because she was overweight she didn’t go on many dates and never had a boyfriend.  She hated herself.  She couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her.  And then sometime in the middle of college, she said she had a dream where this beautiful man in a tuxedo walked up to her in a crowd of people, leaned in close and whispered in her ear “I’ve been waiting for you.”  And she knew Jesus was the only man she needed to worry about seeking approval from.

I loved this story.  I cherished this story and kept it close and waited for my own personal tapping from a tuxedoed man from beyond.  But it never happened.  

Maybe he is still waiting.

I will never be nineteen again living in England.  I will never go on a date with an amazing man, beautiful and successful and inexplicably interested in me.  I feigned a throat ache to escape one of our dates early to try and catch the other man I’d been seeing before his shift was over at his bar.  Except the first man caught me hiding behind a building, and somehow, we ended up hanging out for longer.  I think I made up some sort of lie that it didn’t seem like he was having fun so I was trying to give him an easy out.  He told me it wasn’t true and he wanted to go have another drink, and if I would join him.  Of course he chose “this great place around the corner” which happened to have been the bar of the other man I was seeing.  I will never be so young and naïve again to think it would all turn out ok.  They didn’t throw punches, but they got in each other’s face and words were said, threatening and brutish words from the man behind the bar, and apologetic and sophisticated words from the man I had brought there. I ran to the bathroom with my roommate who was already there and we giggled and were nervous and were too tipsy to be grown up about any of it.   When I came back out, they were standing in front of each other and it was like looking at two archetypes of different classes.  One that goes to a bar, and one that is working behind it.  After the beautiful man took me home in a car far nicer than anything I had ever ridden in, I kissed him goodnight.  For all of his beauty and success and kindness towards me, he wasn’t that good of a kisser.  And it was how I rationalized choosing one over the other.  I texted him later that week and told him I had decided to date someone else.  I didn't think I deserved him.  I thought he would figure out who I was and how much better he was than me.  I will never again believe I deserve only the man behind the bar.  

I had to say I was sorry a lot to the other man, the “someone else,” but he forgave me quickly.  My bringing another date into his bar made him realize how much he actually cared about me, so he told me later.  He was my first love. 

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't lied about my throat.

I will never be twenty-four again and walk out of my professor’s office with the warm and smooth feel of my readers’ handshakes on my own clammy hand, nervous and shaking.  The world will never feel that big.  The triumph I felt after defending my work will never be replicated.  The possibilities of “out there” will never feel so numerous.  But I’ll also never feel so disappointed in myself at the very same time.  After all of their validation and congratulations on the work I had done, I wanted to scream at them that it wasn’t work at all.  I will never again look back with such clarity at the end of those nine years, nineteen semesters and ninety thousand dollars how I had slept through it.  I didn’t try.  I never had to.  I laughed a little bit in my car as I drove myself home, alone, after calling my mom and my dad and texting my boyfriend to see where we should go to celebrate my zombie-walk through my college career.  They let me get away with it.  They handed me a degree and a bill.  (No promises though, the hard part would come later.)  Should I have taken harder classes?  Were there harder classes?  Should I have gone to better school or was I too chicken to have applied? 

I’ll never know. 

To Shirley...

We were the lucky ones.

We were the ones that got our grandmother twice a year for weeks at a time.

We would see her in the summer, leaving behind the heat and the sticky air and the small town gossip and drive up north to where it was just then spring, pink blossoms and her huge yard exploding with color.

We would see her in the winter, for Christmas, for New Years, for snow, for cookies, for presents, for hugs.

And when we didn't see her, we talked to her on the phone, for hours.  She entertained our little stories, believed in our little worlds, told us about her little garden fairies causing mischief again and her little poodle that could never quite catch them.

She taught me to paint, my memories of this as blurry as the water colors on those thirsty pages.  I was never any good, my creativity in the arts leaked out of me and was swallowed up by my mother and sister.  My poppies looked like red upturned umbrellas with a giant black hole in the middle, my grass and sky separated by a thick black line broke the picture up too violently, my people drawn too large or too small to scale with my simple houses.  Her pictures were like pictures out of a book, like the paintings that hung on the walls of the museums she would take us to, showing us Monet, Manet, Renoir and Van Gogh.  But she never let on that mine were not perfect.  She always praised.  She always kept them, framed them, showed them off to all of her other artful friends.

She taught me how to string popcorn and cranberries to hang on the tree.  She taught me how to make deviled eggs.  She showed me how to make cakes and would tell me all the stories about working in a bakery and helping her father and about how pretty her dresses were that she wore to her high school dances.  She was brave and strong enough to pull out our loose teeth and she promised it wouldn't hurt, and it never did.  She told me about the trouble she would get into with her brothers and sister.  She made me feel less badly about fighting with my sister because she said that's what kids do.  She made me feel like a person.  She let me know that I counted.  She filled me up.

When we would drive home, I would cry until almost Kentucky, so sad to be away from the magical woman for another boring six months.  And then our mother would let us stop and talk to her at a payphone along the way, checking in, hearing her soothing words that summer break would be here before we knew it, and oh all of the fun things she already had planned for us.  She was going to take us to Fernwood.  She was going to teach us to draw in nature.  She was going to take us to tea.

She always had short hair, effortlessly stylish.  She wore purple, even though she was so young.  She smoked, but I never remember her smelling like it.  I only remember peppermint and lilacs.  I made her a chart once; a thirty-step guide to quitting in a month.  I allowed her a pack a day, and then eased her off day-by-day, cigarette-by-cigarette.  It was misspelled and the drawings of the come-to-life cigarettes with scowls on their faces surely brought a great deal of laughter from her and her siblings as they all sat around the dining room table in her mother's house, my great-grandmother, for a family reunion.

But then she got sick.  And her heart didn't want to work anymore.  And it was terrifying.  And I wasn't allowed in the room.  And I remember my mother crying.  After hearing all of those words and too-big thoughts and so-many-months to live, I was aware of my own heart like I had never been aware of before.  I felt like I could see everyone else's heart, we were all beating and pumping and working like nothing had ever happened, like they all hadn't just been broken, like they hadn't all been pierced with the possibility that there would be one less among us.

I had just learned fractions.  I remember that.  And I remember them telling us, or telling my mom and her sister and then they telling us in words that were softer, were easier, were simpler to swallow, that she had only a third of her heart left working, the rest of it, the upper two-thirds had simply quit.  And because I had just learned fractions, I knew one third was much smaller than two thirds.  And that it wasn't good. They didn't think she had more than six months left with us.

So we moved home, we moved to her home, we moved to the wonderful place that once was but was now just a shell and ticking clock.  She wasn't the woman that once made me feel like anything was possible.  We were there to say goodbye, to pray, to hope they were wrong.

And they were.

That was almost fifteen years ago.  And the approximate 186 days after the doctor had delivered the blow that would change our lives forever, she kept on breathing.  Her heart with only a third of its power and strength and will to live kept on pumping.  She stayed with us.  She woke up smiling.

I believed in magic that year.   I believed in angels and God and miracles.  I believed they were as close to us as we were to her, sitting in her garden, helping her weed and mulch and set up her easel.

She has never stopped being part of my life.  I am a woman now, a grown up that moved far far away.  But we still share secrets.  We still talk and giggle and commiserate over the phone.  She still encourages my creativity, prints out all of my stories and saves them in a file for when "I'm famous."
Well, Gram, this one is for you.  Thank you for everything.  Thank you for staying alive.  Thank you for making me want to live this life creatively.  Thank you for making fairy furniture and reading me books and teaching me to bake.  You left your mark.  You influenced my life.  And I will forever be grateful.

Happy birthday.

All my love,

Lynnie.

Feminism, Memoirs and What Got Me Really Heated Tonight.

What started out as procrastination from completing my words for the NaNoWriMo contest -  scrolling through Facebook and seeing all of my proud friends clicking the button the lets their newsfeed know that they voted today, a few stragglers who are just now uploading photos of their Halloween costumes, and a couple funny Youtube videos, turned into the absolute necessity to write this blog post. 

Lena Dunham released her first book and memoir Not That Kind of Girl  a few weeks ago.  I bought it, proud to support a fellow memoirist and my local bookstore, and eager to read what she had to say about growing up, becoming a writer, and becoming the phenomenon that she is today.  Admittedly, I might have gone into it with the hope that I would be clued in to some small secret of unlocking one's creative potential, or the acceptance of one's body as it is - beautiful - and not the object of public scrutiny and constant demands to be perfect.  And, while I liked it, and read it quickly, it felt more like a longer and more literary (obviously) version of her show "Girls," which I also thoroughly enjoy and often relate to.  I passed the book along to a friend, another "Girls" lover and haven't thought much about it since.

And then I found out, during my non-writing spree on Facebook, that Dunham has been receiving numerous attacks on her book, calling her a "sexual predator," and "child molester."  

The scene that is receiving all of these complaints is as follows:

One day, as I sat in our driveway in Long Island playing with blocks and buckets, my curiosity got the best of me. Grace was sitting up, babbling and smiling, and I leaned down between her legs and carefully spread open her vagina. She didn't resist and when I saw what was inside I shrieked.

My mother came running. "Mama, Mama! Grace has something in there!"

My mother didn't bother asking why I had opened Grace's vagina. This was within the spectrum of things I did.

This scene gave me no pause.  I barely remember it being in the text, let alone prompt me to wage an all-out tweet and hashtag attack on someone for sharing a memory from when they were seven-years-old. The political and cultural critics complaints are ludicrous.  Jia Tolentino, a contributing writer on Jezebel wrote the article "The Right to a Sexual Narrative"  not only doing an exceptional job of detailing exactly who Lena Dunham is, why she is so popular, and what some of her flaws as a writer and public figure are, it also completely dispels the validity of the complaint with her memoir and it's "encouragement of sexual abuse."  My favorite lines from the article:

"To be an adult woman is to have your body be near-universally read as a sexual object when, on the inside, you often feel very different, like a Pokemon or a hungover bag of meat."

"There is enough real abuse out there. There are enough people who never got that freedom to let their own kid bodies be unburdened. Part of granting people the ability to tell their own sexual narrative is granting them the ability to tell their own sexual narrative, whether it matches your reading or not."

I have now read MULTIPLE articles about this, falling - nay - leaping headfirst into the black hole that is the internet and all connecting links to anything even remotely having to do with this case.  It's insane.  I even ambled into Truthrevolt.org (a terrifyingly propagandist place where all logic and reason and TRUTH go to be twisted and swallowed up in a very minute percentage of the population's agenda) and their article about how the First Amendment protects their accusation of her as a sexual predator and their withdrawal of an apology for stringing together DIFFERENT sections of her books to piece together a case in which she was seventeen and not seven when this episode occurred.  Disgusting.  One of the articles states that "Everything doesn't need to be shared..."  I'm sorry, why the fuck not?  Not only has her sister fully supported her sister through this and given express permission (as all memoirists and writers of non-fiction are contracted to do if they are intending to write about and publish real people without changing names and dates and places - did you know that?) of Dunham's use of her memories of her and her sister's interactions.

It's unfortunate there is such hyper-sensitivity out there, from BOTH sides (some of my favorite feminist writers jumped on this ridiculous bandwagon as well, shaming Dunham for using her platform to encourage the "abuse" of the innocent), and that a work of art or piece of writing or the TELLING OF ONE'S OWN STORY is grounds for an accusation of wrong-doing.  The evisceration of the safe space in which to tell about an innocent childhood memory is abhorrent.  She was seven.  This is a non-issue.  What IS the issue is the constant control being perpetrated on women's sexuality insofar that it creates  falsehoods about a CHILD'S intent and natural curiosity.  By exaggerating, misdiagnosing, overreacting and lying about what Lena Dunham "did" to her sister is yet another example of how the media, cultural critics, politicians and uninformed and knee-jerk reactionary FEMINISTS encourage the damaging discourse over what is "appropriate" for a woman to do with and think about her body.



It is a control mechanism people, and it must be recognized as such.

Oy with the Poodles Already!

They just put Gilmore Girls on Netflix.  Streaming, instant, whatever you want to call it.  It originally aired in 2000 - fourteen years ago.  This show defined my teenage years.  It painted a sort of picture that I thought my life would look like as a teenager, as a high schooler, as a college student.  The one-liners, the untraditional way I was raised, but most importantly, the close and unique and so unlike any other kind of mother-daughter relationship.

My mother and I, we were the Gilmore Girls.  You could try to understand us.  We could try to explain how we were.  But it wouldn't cover it.  It wouldn't even come close.  She is the reason that I made a funny face as I walked across the platform when my name was called to accept my college diploma.  She is the reason that I broke up with my first boyfriend.  She is the voice in my head that I hear when I think about doing anything important or scary or hard.

Now, all of you know that I have a sister and my mother has another daughter.  She is an amazing one, the best one really.  The kind of sister that other people wish they had.  A kind of sister that you consider your best friend, that you hope doesn't think you're pathetic and ridiculous and horrible for knowing every little bit of your deepest and darkest secrets because she's just so damn cool and great and smart and together  But all of that - all of that closeness and maturity and wisdom came later, came after high school and college and many, many mistakes.

But during the Gilmore-formative-college-choosing-years, my sister was in high school and had a life filled with friends and parties and boyfriends whereas I preferred imagining my life turning out like the girl in a show.  My mother and I spent a lot of time with each other, sitting across from each other, silently reading books and flipping through magazines and drinking far, far too much coffee.  We were each other's best friend.  We dreamt of opening an inn together, a restaurant, a cafe, a bookstore.  We had so many dreams.

And now, watching this show again, watching this show that I watched fourteen years ago, I smile and drop a happy nostalgic tear for the way in which I began this little life.  More than ten years ago, I started looking for colleges.  I requested information from every college that I ever dreamed of attending.  I sent away for the glossy brochures from Dartmouth and Brown and Yale and UCLA and Notre Dame.  I would sit on the floor of my tiny bedroom, surrounded by the applications, thinking about what kind of essay I would write, what I would say when asked what famous person, living or dead, I would like to have dinner with.  Where I saw myself in five years.  Who had the biggest influence on me, and why.

Then, one day, a friend of mine told me about Grand Valley State University.  A small school in the southwestern part of Michigan that had a great reputation and was affordable to those that had higher GPA's.  It was only two hours away.  And one Sunday, after weeks of looking at the pictures and classes and extracurricular activities online, my mother and I decided to take a trip and tour the campus.

I remember walking around on a misty cold afternoon in January, the strange time between Michigan winter and Midwestern spring, following along with nervous high school seniors and excited parents.  I remember being enchanted.  I remember looking at the tall buildings and the massive classrooms and the not at all awful cafeteria food with great coffee and movie nights and book stores and dusty and perfect libraries.  And I remember trailing behind the group with my mom, joking around and sharing a coffee and joyously looking forward to what my life would be like once I started college.

We chose to stay the night, get the full effect and feel and experience of living on campus.  It's so strange looking back and remembering the places we walked and ate and drank coffee and slept and then later knowing them as places I walked to class every day and ate lunch every day and drank coffee multiple times a day and never slept again because it was the Honors College that I didn't want to be part of because it came with too many responsibilities.  Anyway.  We stayed on campus. And they put us in this room that for some reason I don't remember having sheets.  It was just this room that was cheaper than a hotel even though we could have driven home but we didn't.   And I remember laughing with her.  I remember the mattresses being squeaky and both of us being too excited about my future in a college to sleep and the unsettled feeling that comes with sleeping away from one's own bed causing us to stay awake.  So we decided to get up.  And we walked down in our pajamas with a bag of Oreo's and bottles of vending machine water and figured out how to turn on the TV in the great room on the bottom floor.  It was winter break.  Campus was empty.   We watched the VH1 show "I Love the 80's: Part Deux." We laid on our sides on the common room couches, giggling and snacking and staying up into the wee hours of the morning, only to wake up late, groggy and guilty for not putting the couches back where we found them,  We were impressed by the omelette bar and drank more than our fair share of coffee and then we got back in the car and drove home, talking incessantly about the pros and cons of the college that we just visited.  That memory, that magic, that laughter and that trip is why I consider my mom my best friend.

This is her birthday month.  And since that college visit over a decade ago, we've taken many trips and spent many hours giggling together up late when we should have been sleeping.  But regardless of the age that she is turning this year, she will always be 38 to me.  That age, that number that means nothing, will always be the time that I remember my amazing mother.  She is great.  She is crazy.  No one will ever understand her like my sister and I understand her.  I miss her every day. I talk to her every day.  I would not be who I am without the influence that she had in my life.  She is my guidepost.

She is my llama.

I love you momma.

Oy with the poodles already!!

The llamas are vacuuming!