malarky-shenanigans:

alanis morissette : right through you

this song is important. you cant just give it to any 17 yr old on a reality tv show and like, expect them to do anything with it man like im sorry, i was cool with your heart-shaped box horror or whatever, but at least fucking try. but the point is this song is important and dont you forget it.

“i was cool with your heart-shaped box horror or whatever, but at least fucking try” 

liz phair’s “dogs of LA” is everything i want in my life right now for so many historically significant reasons. 

here is what dorothy allison said to me re: writing about people with whom you are intimate

it’s not that i don’t sympathize.

the summer after my sophomore year of college a guy i ran into in a hallway asked, “aren’t you gideon’s girlfriend?” i said no, i was his ex, but we were still friends, why? he wanted to know if i would give gideon back one of his short stories, something he had written for a class and passed around for other friends and professors to read as well. i said sure. i went back to the admissions office, where i worked, and flipped through it. the story turned out to be all about me. my name was changed to my mom’s, but all other identifying details were the same. the descriptions of our sex life were pretty explicit. my college was really small. 

our senior year, right before graduation, dorothy allison spoke to a small group of the more serious writers about what it had been like to write bastard out of carolina and the perils of writing about people with whom you are intimate. all of these guys in the room started tittering until she finally asked what was going on. i said ”they’re laughing because gideon wrote a story about me” and she was all “who is gideon?” i would never be so lame as to point at him, so i think he had to raise his hand. 

it was an amazing pedagogical moment when dorothy allison looked back and forth at both of us and said something like, “the thing is, as a writer, you can write about whoever you want. you just have to be prepared for whatever their reaction is, because they don’t have to like it.” 

for years when i told this story i told it like i won some battle. see, gideon, there are consequences. i had called him after i read his piece and told him i would never speak to him again, which i basically haven’t. (sadly, i will never see the velveteen rabbit tattoo he got after i gave him the book as a gift, nor the lloyd dobbler tattoo on his upper thigh. oh well.)  

but now when i tell the story—usually to myself—the emphasis is different. as sharon olds has said, in a poem, about the trauma inflicted on her by her parents: “do what you are going to do, and i will tell about it.” 

that doesn’t mean that the people being told about, in public, like it, and there are real material consequences to that. i get that telling “secrets” is not an ethics for everyone, certainly not for people who are better protected by secrets. 

for me, the renarrativization of my incarceration, and the surrounding events, is a political intervention and totally in keeping with my entire theoretico-life project. i am reminded of the time when jon asked the members of my 2010 emp panel a question in reference to each of our high school sex lives. in other words: this is not a surprise and it isn’t like he has never colluded. i write about artists who use themselves in their work; i write about tumblr. and i always talked about him on this tumblr, even before we were dating. what i am saying is: why would i not do so now.

last night he told me he has tried to be ethical in the wake of our relationship; the implication being that i have not. i told him that earlier this week i found an email from him sent exactly a week after my miscarriage, when i was home alone with gynecological pains, with the all-caps subject line “YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO GETS TO BE HURT.” it proceeded to tell me that i was not proactively looking out for his post-miscarriage feelings (actually, i really was). he also refused to tell me when we could see each other that week and then accused me of not wanting to spend time with him when i replied that though i really wanted to be with him, if he couldn’t tell me, i would make plans with other people, because i was feeling really fragile, not to mention i was scared about what was going on physically, and didn’t want to be alone right then. what is unethical, to me, is his thinking it was okay to treat me this way ever, but especially after a fraught surgery. what is ethical is my talking about it. i didn’t get to the psych ward all by myself and i’m not the only person who has been in a situation like this. as a feminist colleague of mine said, “you think you’re smarter than this, but it can still happen to you.” 

and anyway, as jane tompkins so eloquently put it, “the private-public dichotomy, which is to say the public-private hierarchy, is a founding condition of female oppression. i say to hell with it.” 

indeed. and i guess i was really in love with him once, which counts for something when making decisions, but i will always be in love with my feminist ethics more. and i meant what i said: i would feel fine if he talked about our relationship. i have nothing to hide. 

i can’t wait until everyone posts the video from tonight in a few hours. this is the one important song i have not yet posted. the first half is really the best. 

lyrics: 

going to the fiona apple concert was one of the best and most satisfying things i have ever done. i really did smile almost the entire time. she played every song i’ve tumblrd: “fast as you can,” “paper bag,” “mistake,” and “sleep to dream.” she also played “extraordinary machine” and “criminal.”

as aliza said before i went, “i think this is actually the perfect instance of what richard schechner would call a ‘transformation ritual.’ you will do it, and you will be different afterwards.”

i am, i am, i am. 

the last day of class in my junior year of high school the english teacher gave us a list of the books to read that summer and i went home and stayed up almost all night reading the temple of my familiar instead of studying for the exam the next day because that is how i have always rolled, which is part of why i wasn’t even in honors english my sophomore year, because i could not bear the boring reading and wouldn’t do it. this identity-work descriptor is sort of irrelevant to the story (but not to the story that is my complicatedly anti-identitarian post-traumatic identity-work). anyway, we were supposed to write some sort of personal essays on the books we read that summer and i wrote my essays on temple and on cat’s eye.the first day of english class our senior year the teacher was all “no one did these essays right except for kara” and read one or maybe both of them.

i remember the thrill of her reading them, though i don’t remember what they said, just that it was not stuff i would have ever talked about in catholic school. i was so good at the confessional “I.” even without going to confession! i mean, i read sassy. i don’t think anyone else i knew did. don’t believe everything you read about 1992.

anyway my predilections were in place so young; it’s so sad we didn’t have photobooth or livejournal in the 90s. so much lost time to make up and also it’s going to take me a little while to get to aliza’s 1000 creepy reading-in-bed pictures, but maybe i can write about narcissistic posting for one of my exams and rationalize my new hobby, the way i do with everything, including tumblr. there will be references to the hospital, archives of feeling and shoshana felman, and to that judith butler quote about recognition that i will post or reblog if i can find it. 

also i’m really into the “professionally creepy” tag. i’ve never used the word “creepy” before this but 2012, new beginnings, etc. it’s a good redescription of exactly what i usually am and always aspire to be. 

allabouttoriamos:

earswithfeet:

Tori Amos - Crucify (LIVE - Welcome to Sunny Florida DVD)

The best live version of Crucify, EVER.

I completely agree! It’s the best!

tonight’s soundtrack. 

bummersum:

part of the first verse of this song got stuck in my head while i was in the shower, so as soon as i hopped out i had to listen to it over and over:

i let the beast into soon

i don’t know how to live without my hand on his throat

i fight him always and still

oh darling it’s so sweet

you think you know how crazy

how crazy i am

this is such a good live performance. also, her hair, i love it. probably one of the main reasons why i insist on not brushing my hair and making sure it looks like i never do: so i look like a manic mess.

her manic mess look is so delightfully pre-olsen. such well-chosen lines to quote. i would only add: 

i may be soft in your palm but i’ll soon grow

hungry for a fight, and i will not let you win 

my pretty mouth will frame the phrases that will 

disprove your faith in man 

malarky-shenanigans:

fiona apple : a mistake

fuck if i care at how revealing this is hahahahaha

i have been planning on posting this but i like this reblog even better. this song is such a historically important fuck you to the tyranny of the nice girl. 

moonii:

Ani DiFranco - You Had Time

you’ll say did they love you or what?
I’ll say they love what I do

this didn’t exactly happen to me, but this totally happened to me, and this is what i listen to if i really want to cry.