(posts) a poem, "Bedecked"

Bedecked

  —Victoria Redel

 

Tell me it’s wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or the toy store rings
               he clusters four jewels to each finger.

He’s bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the star choker,
               the rhinestone strand he fastens over a sock.
Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he says sticker earrings
               look too fake.

Tell me I should teach him it’s wrong to love the glitter that a boy’s only
               a boy who’d love a truck with a remote that revs,
battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels loop-de-looping off tracks
               into the tub.

Then tell me it’s fine—really—maybe even a good thing—a boy who’s
               got some girl to him,
and I’m right for the days he wears a pink shirt on the seesaw in the park.

Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son who
               still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means—
this way or that—but for the way facets set off prisms and prisms spin up
               everywhere
and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows—made every shining
               true color.

Now try to tell me—man or woman—your heart was ever once that brave.

 

 

 

Note: Using smaller font to preserve more of the poet's own line breaks.

 

something about Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"

Most critics recognize The Sun Also Rises as Hemingway's best work. Published in 1926, the story follows an American expatriate traveling from Paris through Spain in the company of other American and British expatriates. Literary commentary inevitably refers to how the novel captures the Lost Generation's sense of disillusionment. Sure enough, Book I of this slim novel passes time in Paris, and there we see how unbearable disillusioned people can be, conspicuously bored and uncomedically witty. But after Book I, The Sun Also Rises reveals itself to be a potent, beautifully rich novel. Even the waste and cruelties of Book I become meaningful when recast in the violence at the fiesta.

There are so many wonderful lines. Examples:

Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest.

And,

"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."

And that phrasing is called back later:

The bull gathered himself, then his head went forward and he went over slowly, then all over, suddenly, four feet in the air.

But maybe my favorite part is the chapter in which Jake is drunk in his hotel room, thinking through his views on life. This chapter includes the following:

Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.

I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had.

Perhaps that wasn't true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.

about the flight in

The Chinese girl was saving the middle seat for her man. She boarded long before him because she checked in on time. He arrived. Between sandy hair and a trim build is the prematurely aged face of hard living; he wears a flannel shirt as though he always does; she wears a flannel shirt to signal union. He leans over to her sometimes and speaks. His voice seems to quietly echo out of his mouth. Later, he will get up to use the restroom and end up waiting several minutes longer for his turn than expected. The Chinese girl will watch him, watching him for minutes while her iPhone continues streaming. Across the aisle from the Chinese girl and her fuckup boyfriend, a man takes a seat next to a young mother who cautions him, "Hope you don't mind a fussy baby!" He smiles and says he does not. The baby will sleep the entire flight, but he will take out a pair of fingernail clippers and go to work grooming at 30,000 feet. On my row, a grandmother pushes up the window shade with both hands, and the sun blasts through my eyes.

something about female characters and black characters

In the 2014 film Top Five, Chris Rock is Andre, an actor attempting to transition from hammy comedies to drama. Andre played a smart-alec live-action bear in a comedy franchise; now, in a maudlin historical film, he attempts to play a Haitian slave revolting against European colonialists. In this casting, we get the message that black characters in media are often minstrel-like entertainers or suffering caricatures.

In the 1975 masterpiece One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a similar point is made (albeit indirectly) about women in media. In this film, Nurse Ratched, played by Louise Fletcher, is contemptible because she appears to be neither of the things women typically are expected to be: sexual or nurturing.

Notes:
Admittedly not a perfect theory, and not a perfect pairing.
Rock also wrote and directed the film.

About self

We spoke first in terms of the soul and the vessel, then the spirit and the flesh, and then the mind and body. Now we speak in terms of identity and biology.

Inconsequential

People who follow politics and political coverage often criticize the media for not explicating policy proposals and instead focusing on polls and swing states. Such critics see the media as too focused on distractions. Now, following Tuesday's Presidential debate, an online public hears Romney's "binders full of women" comment and amplifies it, silencing other discussions for a day or so.

Maybe the "binders full of women" is sort of amusing, and within that amusement is the sense that some things are odd about Romney. Some things are, but nothing evidenced in his comment is revelatory unless you've never thought about who Mitt Romney is beyond his brand, "successful businessman".

The larger discourse on women voters and women's issues seems far more revealing about what we're like, and how we perceive ourselves and those around us. Women are sort of treated as a political g-spot in need of some serious finessing. This gender-oriented political discourse seems to say that a candidate needs to understand and address things women "care about" without appearing to stereotype women or lock them in the home. This CNN article on Romney's women-talk during the debate cites a political science professor voicing such a concern:

"His discussion of work-life balance appeared condescending to some because of the reference to women cooking dinner."

So the candidate must embrace gender difference but frame his embrace in terms of equality. Maybe most or all political discourse aimed at a specific segment of the voting public includes some version of outlining that segment, then erasing those lines, of conjuring their image, then making them disappear, but women are a good, current example of this, I think. The finessing and specific, pointed targeting of women leaves an impression that women are both foreign and essential to political discourse. A political writer in The New Yorker touched on all this when addressing political ads aimed at "women voters":

... that ad, like every ad targeted to women voters for the last half century, including those made by both campaigns this election season, assumes that women are wholly different species of citizen than men. The political imagination of American women, at least according to American political advertisers, begins with our cervixes and ends at the kitchen door.

Notes:

• The "binders full of women" meme nearly obscured the best bit of political gamesmanship by anybody of either party in years: Obama's "Proceed, Governor".

• Embracing gender difference while seeking equality is sort of similar to how feminist theory works in academia, I'd say, from my very limited experience with it.