As you might imagine, this kind of writing was the kind we were encouraged to produce. It was not the stuff of generic, topical fiction, but (what often seemed) a mystery of the power to wield words, weaving magical patterns with verbs, nouns and adjectives. It was the poetic more than the explanatory that mattered.

In creative writing classes, there were writers that were respected; Helen Garner, Annie Dillard, Jeanette Winterson, and writers that weren’t; John Grisham, Bryce Courtney, Jodi Picoult. And, like any niche area, there were unspoken rules of what you could and could not read, what was quality, and what was trash.

After plunging myself into this world for three and a half years, it’s no surprise that I came out somewhat of a ‘book snob’. I snubbed generic fiction, smiling politely when one of my friends told me what a great book they’d just read, like Memoirs of a Geisha or something else in the top 20 reads at Borders. I threw out all but a handful of my ‘chick lit’, bemoaning the days when I thought that Meg Cabot and Monica McInnerney were ‘good writers’.  I worked my way through some middle ground in the years that followed, with books like Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye and Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible. Then, when I got depressed last year, at a point where things like what books I read where the last thing that mattered, I let my standards fall to the lowest of lows and read the entire Twilight series. It was mostly out of curiosity, but I won’t deny that although I’d never read anything by Stephenie Meyer for the quality of the writing, that didn’t mean that I didn’t enjoy them. A little.

Jodi Picoult, however, is one author that I had vowed I’d never read. Not after the number-one-best-seller-ever-second-person-is-reading My Sister’s Keeper, not even after several of my friends offered to lend me one of her books. That was until last week. One of my friends offered to lend me Sing You Home, prefacing it with the fact that it was a ‘gay book’ about a couple trying to have a baby via IVF. I glanced at it with some curiosity and thought why not? At least, if it was crap, I could honestly say that Jodi Picoult was a terrible writer, and I’d never read another one of her novels again.

Well, after a few pages I was hooked. I read around 50 pages a day, and finished it in just over a week. The first part of the story follows a couple, Max and Zoe, who have tried to have a baby for ten years via IVF and have two miscarriages and a stillborn. The next part of the novel details Max and Zoe’s divorce, and Zoe’s meeting and falling unexpectedly in love with Vanessa, a counselor at the local high school who hires Zoe (a music therapist) to help a suicidal teenager, Lucy. In the meantime, Max has moved in with his millionaire religious brother and his wife. After a car crash, Max becomes a born-again Christian and begins attending a conservative, right-wing church run by a rich, dominating pastor who dictates the lives of his ‘flock’. At the same time, Zoe and Vanessa get married in Massachusetts, the neighboring state to Rhode Island where the novel is set, which doesn’t recognized gay marriage. When they decide they want to have a baby, Zoe realizes that there are still three frozen embryos at the IVF clinic that they could use to attempt to have a child together. All she needs is Max’s permission to use the embryos. After discussing it with his pastor, Max is convinced that Zoe and Vanessa are unfit parents to parent a child since they are homosexuals who are ‘an abomination’ in God’s eyes and ‘living in sin’. Under the sway of his pastor, Max sues Zoe for custody of the ‘pre-born’ children, with the intention of giving them to his infertile brother and his wife to raise instead, in a ‘traditional Christian family’ with a mother and a father.

Let me say straight up; you don’t read Jodi Picoult for the flow of the words of the page, the sentence structure, the poetic nature of her writing. She is not that kind of writer. But upon thinking about this, I don’t think that that makes her any less of a writer than the niche writers I spent my Uni degree studying. It’s just writing for a different purpose. And Picoult can certainly tell a story. I didn’t read this novel because it was about gay rights, I read it because the characters and relationships and issues were so pressing and real that I couldn’t put it down. It was less important that Zoe and Vanessa were a lesbian couple than the relationships between and around them and the issues that flared up in the plot. It was central, of course, to the plot itself that Zoe and Vanessa be gay, or it would have been and entirely different story. But what I appreciated most about Sing You Home is how Picoult could write about a gay couple and gay rights without having it be a ‘gay book’, because it simply wasn’t. It was a book about relationships, gay, straight, or otherwise. Yet at the same time, it was nice to have Zoe and Vanessa’s relationship existent in the novel, amongst the others, amongst life, because that’s how I see gay relationships, or gay people in life in general. Not existing in their own little bubble, but as part of the world like everyone else.

As for the religious right vs. gay rights factor that took up a huge part of the novel, I find it difficult to really identify this with anything that I’ve seen in my own life. Maybe it’s because Australian’s simply are not as vocal as American’s seem to be, but I’ve never seen or heard of a church or people like the ones that represented Christianity in Sing You Home. They insisted that they weren’t ‘anti-gay’ and yet it was clear that they were (obviously Picoult intended to show them as hypocrites). Yet there was a small part of me that was angered by the ignorance and saddened by the way the character Max was twisted by people controlling his beliefs. Yet it didn’t really ring true with anybody that I’ve seen or heard of, other than one (American) man I once heard talk at church. I wonder, a lot, whether other than going to a gay church, whether gayness and Christianity can be reconciled. Can I go to church and be out without people praying the gay away? The church I sometimes go to is a far cry from the one in Picoult’s novel, and yet I still hear people talking against gay marriage. And yet on the same day, I’ll hear or see someone I know is a Christian advocating for gay marriage, and think ‘maybe not all is lost’. Most of my close Christian friends are pro same-sex marriage, which is incredibly heartening for me after struggling with this stuff for the last few years.

I’m not lining up for the next Jodi Picoult novel. I’m planning to move on and try and sample some different writer’s, like Joyce Carol Oates and Jonathan Safran Foer. But that certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t intend to read another Picoult down the track.  Sing You Home wasn’t a Pulitzer prize winning novel, and it probably won’t be put on any university book lists (unless it’s a gender studies class), but it’s definitely shaken me out of my book snobbery. No longer will I shake my head at the next Anita Shreve I see being read on the train. I might even read one myself.

A blog dedicated to the best of the tress

Let me be frank. I heart redheads.The most beautiful people in the world, in my opinion, are those who are often persecuted under the banner of ‘the ranga’. There is simply nobody more lovely than the russet haired Julianne Moore, and nobody cuter than the ginger freckle face Rupert Grint. So, here’s some visual pleasure of the red variety for us all to appreciate.

No.1

No. 2

No. 3

No.4

No. 5

No. 6

No.7

No.8

No. 9

No. 10

But I have been thinking that there has to be a different way to approached gender inequality and gender issues that doesn’t destroy me in the process.

Any suggestions?

For a case-closed comment on transgender issues, I don’t think anyone could go past this one:

THANKYOU lgbtlaughs.tumblr.com

And as of now, I’m going to come up with one (or more) positive ways of exploring and celebrating gender and feminist issues (despite all it’s foibles) everyday. Or, one happy non-gender related thing everyday.

Note – The revolution is not really my boyfriend. It would be nice if it was. To get this you’d have to watch ‘The Rasperry Reich’ by Bruce LaBruce. Which I wouldn’t reccomend unless your into political porn films that get national bans.

And it’s also a nice (errr…. unique?) exploration of genderqueer.

No wait – they reblogged it from: http://grrrlpower.tumblr.com/post/7915660907/feminism-101-helpful-hints-for-dudes

I don’t understand tumblr! godammit.

__________________________

Feminism 101 – Helpful Hints for dudes

OR, WHAT I WISH I COULD SAY TO EVERY MAN I KNOW. AND MOST WOMEN

1. Every woman is an expert on her own life and experiences.

2. No woman speaks for all women.

3. No woman speaks for all feminists.

4. Because of the way cultural dominance/privilege works, marginalized people are, by necessity and unavoidability, more knowledgeable about the lives of privileged people than the other way around. Immersion in a culture where male is treated as the Norm (and femalea deviation of that Norm), and where masculinity is treated as aspirational (and femininity as undesirable), and where men’s stories are considered the Stories Worth Telling, and wheremanhood and mankind are so easily used as synonymous with personhood and humankind, and where everything down to the human forms on street signs reinforce the idea of maleness as default humanness, inevitably makes women de facto more conversant in male privilege than men are in female marginalization. That’s the practical reality of any kind of privilege—the dominant group can exist without knowing anything about marginalized group, but the marginalized group cannot safely or effectively exist without knowing something about the privileged group and its norms and values.

5. Which is not to say that men can’t become fluent, with effort. But it is important to remember that it does take effort. Even though men’s and women’s lives can look so similar at first glance, it is shocking how very different they can actually be. (For example.)

6. A woman with intersectional marginalizations cannot wrench herself into parts. Asking a woman to set aside her race, or disability, or sexuality, or body size, or stature, or whatever, in order to discuss a “woman’s issue,” is to fail to understand that one’s womanhood is inextricably linked to the other aspects of one’s identity.

7. It is similarly unfair to ask a woman to leave aside her personal experience and discuss feminist issues in the abstract. You are discussing the stuff of her life. Asking her to “not make it personal” is to ask her to wrench her womanhood from her personhood.
8. You are not objective on women’s issues because you’re not a woman. Your perception is just as subjective as hers is, but for a different reason. Either we stand to be marginalized by privilege or stand to benefit from it. That’s the reality of institutional bias; it compromises us all.

9. Don’t play Devil’s advocate. Seriously. Just don’t.

10. Listen.

______________________________

is just too fucking hard sometimes.

and you end up like

THIS

So maybe we should just all believe in

THIS

Oh, but wait….

That leads right back to

THIS

WHOOPS.

- and i’ve been told lately that I only see things in black and white. guess that leaves you out, technicolor.

REVOLUTION

IS

OFF

THE

AGENDA

-Politics in Space. K. M-H.

” What was once… the resurrection of the dead, of anonymous and silenced generations …. has meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum.” -Frederic Jameson

Sorry, Alexis.

“WILL YOU EVER GET THE MESSAGE AND JUST LEAVE IT ALL BEHIND?”

It’s happening again. The same thing. Stripped of your crutches, the monster emerges again. Before. Before. Before. It’s all you can think about.  The lack of composure. The lost dignity. The agitation that drives your mind, forces your legs to move ceaselessly, sucks the tears out of your eyes and drags them down your face. You swore you’d never be back here again. Out of control like a train off its tracks. Capable of anything. Of screaming. Wailing. Cutting. Moaning. Stabbing. Running with no return. Trapped. Tearful. Terrified. Lost in the midst of a self that is not yours.

Your real self, the one which you had regained, has suddenly vanished.  The personhood that you built slowly, painstakingly, through the sheer effort of getting out of bed in the morning.  Through the ceaseless act of putting on self, daily and with constraint, like she revealed to you one day that it would always be. But under duress you succeeded to reclaim the life that was lost. You spent weeks in the arms of another, of others. Months immersed in the world that had become sharp and clear and distinct once more. You bathed in a haze of books and chatter and thought and laughter. You had won, turning your face to the sunlight that had chosen to bless you and follow your movements. To cast only shadows of the monsters that had once ravaged you. Ravaged you. And yet now, only months later, this self has fallen.

Once again, the ending was simultaneously prolonged and brief, similar to the fate of a Jenga tower. You noticed some dark spaces amidst the fullness of the days. A shadow shot right through your centre, and your breath became halted. The tower swayed. And all at once the monster emerged again. Yes. One moment you stood at the precipice, the next you tipped. The monster opened its jaws. You tumbled through the dark. And when you landed, you were once again left with nothing.

It’s the same in other ways too. A different place, yet the same people. They could be from anywhere, they could be anyone. Yet they are familiar. The same. They are the ones that pull you in, that you hope to find comfort with. A small relief to console and be consoled, to take the sufferings of others and discard your own. A temporary measure. But in the end only another form of destruction. For they are not yours, nor are you theirs. They are caricatures, people who will fade into shadows as soon as you leave this place. You will be nothing to them. They, nothing to you but a wasted memory tainted by the glasses assigned to your eyes at the time. But for now they become you, their mannerisms, their voices, their personalities melt into your own. Your struggles become theirs, and theirs yours. You can hardly be sure where you end and they begin. Confined, slapped together in the underbelly of society, you can do nothing if not mingle with its great unwashed.

You knew this last time; the danger enclosed in their shy smiles or comforting arms. The danger of affection – of giving away a part of yourself to others who would only ask for more. You watch the procession helplessly; tender morsels of yourself given timidly until you are swallowed whole. And yet you cannot blame them. There is hardly one whole body between you. Your offerings, however small, help to construct the whole that you all dream of owning. And so you sit, bodily present, mind lost to another world. You hear the words spoken over you.

Sanity in question.

Situation perilous.

Destination unknown. 

And yet a shred of yourself remains. Ribbon thin, frayed, hidden in the mess of wires and sockets. It runs like a spinal cord amidst veins and arteries dyed with artificial colours and flavours. It is swayed, bent, but never broken. It is the voice that speaks with clarity amongst the others, those that try to convince you that you are broken. They; the liars, the cheats. This voice is quieter. It does not shout. It speaks truth. It tells a story that has been lost, that exists only in fables of the aural tradition; voices that have been drowned by the west, by its perilous quest to play God. Because between the red pill and the blue there was once another. It was neutral – its value lost to the world of medicine, its décor demure and as such underrated. It didn’t hand out free mugs and staplers with its presentation, nor holidays to the orient for its champions. That pill was once known as normality – under duress of course, for all who seek struggle to find. Normality.  It is found in the thread of the real, the pill that will center and make true an illegitimate existence. But in this place, they shun normality. For here all are already lost to a darker fate. Instead we are served a regulated, shared meal from which we can all partake. Normality has vanished. Here they replace it with a cheaper brand. Uniqueness. Doesn’t have the quite the same flavour to it. But the starving will eat anything.

 But what of the others? The ones who exist beyond the borders of the shadowlands, those who live beside but apart from me, who I know I will find again, be it in months or years. Their charmed lives have become my benchmark. They, the only reminders of my ribbon thin existence beyond the deep. My friends, my family, the fleshed embodiments of life, the products of the normality pill that sits beyond the locked door. Yes, the ones who live above the surface, who walk the sunny streets with familiarity, with a lazy for granted-ness I can now only dream of. They live unabashed, unconcerned, tossed by waves in a teacup, never knowing of the storm that lies beyond. They are the frying pan to my fire, the molehill to my mountain. They exist in my perpetual Narnia – far beyond the confines of the wardrobe. It is a place I dream of, where the lion lives and the witch is vanquished, never to return.

Well after a total of 42 days, I’ve finished my 30 day song challenge. I undertook this for a couple of reasons. It looked like fun, my friend Amy was doing it, and I was interested in seeing just what my songs would turn out to be. I decided to put the songs onto my blog rather than just posting them as links of facebook, because I hoped putting them here would encourage me to write about them, and as such to generate more ideas for writing.

I don’t write as much as I would like. When I finished my undergrad, I couldn’t disguise my relief that I would never again have to sit in a creative writing tutorial having my work perused and critiqued by a bunch of amateur writers and a tutor that was oftentimes a bit of a wanker. I felt all the creative juice had been sucked out of me by this rigid analysing and judgment-calling on what constitued good writing. I also felt that my sense of worth as a writer was dependent on whether or not I had been published or not. It was all very ego-killing and draining, and I was glad when it was over. I spent some time writing a fiction piece last year, until my energy ran out and I realised I didn’t care enough about it to keep going. Instead, I decided to throw myself into film studies – and have spent this semester trying to keep up with the crazy cinephile kids who must spend all their free time glued to screens in order to have seen anything and everything that was brought up in class.

I seem to put alot of investment into the idea of having a ‘thing’ that I’m good at. I want to be an expert at something, be recognised for it, and spend all my time with it. When I don’t feel like I’m creating anything or learning anything that contributes to this, I get despondent. I compare myself to other people. I want to give up unless I feel like I’m the best. This goes back a long way. I remember quitting gymnastics as a ten year old because there was somebody there that was better than me. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the idea that I need to have ’skills’… I want to learn how to make stuff, to cook, sew, garden, knit, speak another language, build furniture, make art, operate a film camera and be able to edit film. In some ways I think this is a bit of a similar thing; while I don’t expect to be the best at these things, I’m vested in the idea of self improvement, or being multi-talented, or something. I don’t think this is all bad. The desire to learn and create is good, as is some of my motivation behind wanting to do these things, such as being more environmentally friendly and living more sustainably, learning slow-producing (not sure if that’s the right term) ways to to things, instead of buying everything from china. I realise that this is very in vogue right now, and that I’m not immune from the influence of trendiness. But, if trendiness encourages people to do good, helpful and positive things, then I salute it. But back to what I was saying…

In doing this song challenge, I wanted to encourage myself to write for the sake of writing. Write because I enjoy it, and because it brings out good things in me (erm, most of the time, that is). While I know there will always be the secondary motivation of self-improvement, that nasty, manipulative voice that is the other side of the coin, hopefully there will be enough love and enjoyment of what I’m doing to overcome that.

I hoped in the 30 day challenge to write an average of a hundred words per day. There were several days, especially on the home stretch, that I didn’t write anything. And then days where the words poured out. I read an article for uni that had the results of an experiment in it, in which people were given compulsory writing time, and had to donate money to a charity if they didn’t write. The other group didn’t have this motivator, and were left to their own devices. Not only did the first group write more, but after the experiment was over, they continued to write, because ‘writing generates ideas for more writing’. I like this idea, and it was what I hoped would happen with this blog over the last 42 days. And in a way, it worked. I’m not sure what will motivate me to blog now that this framework has has been completed. I’m sure I could start one myself. I know I don’t want to slip back into the laziness of writing once a month. So I’m going to think of something. Either way, I’ll see you soon.

30 Day Song Challenge Stat’s

Total number of words written: 4,241

Average number of words written each entry: 141 (yes, I beat my aim!)

Most number of words written in one entry: 824 (this post)

Least number of words written in one entry: None (day 23 – the ship song)

I used to love this show!!!

No need to elborate on this one. Although upon looking up the lyrics, I’ve realised they are scarily stalkerish. Which might actually be appropriate. Erm. Yes. Anyway, this one takes me back to 2007.