Room in the east invested with meanings,
Open to none but the strange and the wild
Sunset encounters with destiny’s chances,
Envelopes marked for the personal life
Night falling, hiding the poets transgression,
Blown in the winds of Aquarian tides
Echoed words spoken by token romantics
Rock ‘n roll supermen,
Ghosts of new vice.
Making love in strange autos whilst life’s ink
sings always
That love is swift arrows my dear
Oh, God in some heaven whose number
is seventeen
Dressed you in blue jeans this year
To torment my soul
Oh, leave me alone…
Rules to be broken by reckless and young men,
Odes to be written by passions sick hand
Seeds to be sown on the rich fields of promise,
Ends and beginnings that never quite meet
Nothing of value that hasn’t yet vanished,
Brown-eyed and wise as the feminine fates
Evening’s sweet menace, revealing, inviting,
Highways to paradise
Grey lines of grace.
Making love in strange autos whilst life’s ink
sings always
That love is swift arrows my dear
Oh, God in some heaven whose number
is seventeen
Dressed you in blue jeans this year
To torment my soul
Oh, leave me alone…
I’ve featured songs written by Bill Nelson solo before, so I figured I’d publicly dedicate an appropriate one from his band Be Bop Deluxe. I’ve always loved this one, and I think the symbolism represented in it is perfectly apparent.
As I mentioned on Memnon’s Day, I wrote a further poem in the last few days that would have perhaps been most appropriate to have posted on the day devoted to Herodes Attikos’ children.
I have to admit, I’ve not always been particularly kind to the memory of Attikos Bradua, because Herodes Attikos himself was not kind to him and his memory. He was the only child of Herodes that survived to later adulthood, and actually outlived his father; but, Herodes disinherited him, and they never seemed to get along. As I’ve said previously, I suspect that because Herodes was renowned ….
It also seems that Zsuzsanna Budapest is still on a lot of people’s minds because she just won’t stop digging herself deeper. Her fan-club better known as her lineage of “Dianic witchcraft” hasn’t really been doing her any favours, either. My best friend even had something to say about Budapest:
Thought on a marvellous post about Z Budapest’s most recent flagrant display of queerphobia and mysogyny.
Yes, I just called Z Budapest, Dianic OG “feminst”, a mysogynst. She has styled herself the arbitrater of womanhood, to the exclusion of women’s capacity for self-determination. I’d say that’s pretty fucking mysogynist.
In conversations with trans feminists, I have continually assured them that many Second-Wave radical feminists were NOT transphobic, and actually empathetic to trans people. However, I’ve had trouble finding any proof, other than my own memory and a few trans friends of Kate Millett’s. Depressingly, the more I searched, I found much more proof that radical feminists were mean and vicious (i.e. Robin Morgan’s lynch-mob rhetoric concerning trans women in her book titled Going Too Far). The Janice Raymond/Robin Morgan/Mary Daly faction seems to have “won” the transgender round of radical feminist theory, by default.
And so, it brings me great pleasure, after a very long search, to finally have the following quote IN MY HAND, not just from memory. Thank God for Amazon.com and the used books option, since this is long out of print.
…I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I still find the Dworkin quote exerpted problematic, as part of her conclusions are not only open to interpretation, but her final suggestion for a post-revolution future rests on a gendered, rather than skin-toned, form of the false idea of “let’s all fuck until we’re the same colour”; in reality, the alleles that are responsible for skin colour do not work that way, and “colour-blind” procreation between human skin-tones, in reality, simply produces a greater variance of skin-tone. If a multi-sex species can come to truly accept that fact, then “the end of transsexuality as we know it” may simply be the proliferation of far greater variance in sex, gender, and expression of said (and not to mention the fact that Body Dysmorphic Disorder will not necessarily be eradicated by the fact that some bodies have become more-acceptable): The key words thus should not be “the end of transsexuality”, but the end “as we know it”, and as such, her speculations on what that end-as-we-know-it could mean are too over-reaching. Whether this was to satiate the feminist status quo of the day or was her actual post-revolution dream, I know not, but I have to agree with DaisyDeadhead that —at least for the feminism of the 1970s— this isn’t really transphobic. It’s unfair to hold the excerpts to the same standards for “anti-transphobia” that we have now because for a lot of reasons, the standards we know now just didn’t exist to any useful measure then, and thus I cannot in good conscience call Dworkin transphobic, especially while many of her contemporaries very clearly ARE; to say Dworkin was inherently transphobic (rather than just pointing out that she had some transphobic ideas that got the best of her) is like modern people erasing Al Jolsen’s history of actively promoting the careers of African-Amerikan contemporaries and speaking out against racism because one of his most-remembered career moves was performing in blackface, even when its popularity was waning in the late 1920s.
(I debated making the above a separate post, but decided against it as I’m feeling this blog is getting too over-swamped with gender stuff, lately, and I need to re-focus on my relationship with Eros.)
And speaking of “ill-thought moves and ideas that overshadow one’s legacy”, it will never cease to amuse me this this is not one of those, but considering Yusef Islam’s 2004 detainment at a U$ airport, I can’t help but wonder why it’s not:
(s~o hot…)
So, I know this post is scheduled for March Eighteenth, but whatever, here’s a beautiful article from Cracked than my humanoid meat-based housemate sent me, noting that I could have very well written this thin myself:
On March 17, millions of people take the piss out of Ireland by taking the piss and every other bodily fluid out of themselves, as publicly as possible. The Irish don’t celebrate Independence Day by guzzling hamburgers until we throw up over crates of machine guns, and even if we did it would be more respectful. Because at least we imported those things from the U.S. For a country so worked up about immigrants a lot of Americans are absolutely desperate to claim any other nationality. Every St. Patrick’s Day drunken North Americans stagger up to tell me their great-grandmother was Irish, and I say great, if she turns up I’ll buy her a pint.
No, seriously, my name is Ruadhán J McElroy, and what my father named me is about as ethnic; I am sick to death of the annual bullshit known as “St. Patrick’s Day”. The only way I deal every year is with a home-made t-shirt proclaiming my identity as “Ultach”, a smug sense of superiority that I was raised mostly by my English maternal grandparents, and the fact that I’ve re-purposed the day as the Feast of Hibernia, who I recognise as the Greco-Roman interpretation of the tutelary Goddess Ériu.
That said, St. Patrick is unfairly credited with “converting Ireland”; this is, at best, a half-truth. He was just the first moderately successful missionary to Ireland, and there were far more successful missionaries to Ireland after he died. The misconception, even among pagans and polytheists, that he managed to somehow single-handedly convert Ireland lies in the likely-allegorical tale that was popular for centuries of how Patrick somehow “banished the snakes from Irieland”, with the assumption being “snakes = Druids”; this is not a universally recognised allegory, but all things considered, it seems the most likely.
By the way: Druids? Word on the street is that no-one knows who they were or what they were doing:
ALSO:
Earlier this week, I noticed that Pantheacon has officially declared that from 2013 onward, all single-gender rit and workshops are to include anybody who identifies with that gender —I then promptly wasted three days commenting on The Wild Hunt, because Budapestians simply cannot help but dodge perfectly reasonable questions and then whine about how us transies and our cheer-leaders are FMPPHs. If my computer had a “boot to the head” button, I could have saved at least one day and spent it watching NCIS marathons on USA or finally recording all those old delicious Ramón Novarro films off the DVR —or at least watching the cats collect dust. Here’s a link for posterity.
Just In Case You Were Curious:
I’m going to be doing some spring cleaning over the next week, so that’s an official reason why I might not be posting so much in the next week, and might even skip a round-up for the 25th, in case I don’t get a chance to do much reading.
Your New Old Word for the Week:
Geneclexis, n, from the Greek genos (sex, birth, origin) and eklegein (to select): selecting a marriage partner on the basic of physical appearance, regardless of intellect or character.
This was one of my favourite birds, at least aesthetically, as a child, and it continues to fascinate me now. The Superb Lyrebird, named so for its tail-feathers that resemble Apollon’s famed instrument, is also a splendid mimic imitating a variety of sounds including, but far from limited to other bird songs.
You speak of freedom of religion. You say “this is their Tradition and they have a right to it.” And this is true.
You speak in generalized platitudes about religious tolerance, of freedom. You say nothing of the pain caused to the individual. My “beef” with Z. Budapest and Dianic Wicca is not one of generalized platitudes. It is personal.
And, to be honest, I think this move comes at a very opportune time. The transphobic remarks of Z. Budapest caused enough harm and upset in the community, but recently she’s written something which I don’t think has had as much attention but that nonetheless has me a little worried that she’s also moved into good old-fashioned homophobia as well: rapists are really just gay men. (Let’s ignore for the moment that it’s not only males that perpetrate rape, sexual assault, and other forms of sexual abuse…) Despite the provisional acceptance of gay men that Z. had expressed in certain situations in the past, this is doing something entirely different. I’ve written about the fallacy that ‘homophobia = homoeroticism’ previously, but this kind of twists it into an even further strange territory. Yes, rapists are horrible people, I think we can all agree on that. But, to make this tautological claim that (male) rapists are really just gay, because that means they’re not “real men” and are kind of even scummier than just “regular men” as a result, is pretty over-the-top in a ton of ways. Unlike some of the commenters on Z.’s blog post, I’m not inclined to see this as anti-men so much (although it is) as much as it’s anti-gay men. Given that this blog post came at a time not long after Hyperion and others refused to “defend” Z. at PantheaCon, I can’t help but wonder if that might be a contributing factor to the overall tenor of her remarks there…
Just In Case You Were Curious:
…about the music, six weeks ago or something, someone on the goth.net forum, who clearly doesn’t know music as well as they think they do, once (apparently seriously) described Ska as “punk mixed with jazz”. Er, no honey, “punk + jazz” equals No Wave. And whatever you’d call Rig Rig + Panic (some purists believe that “No Wave” is strictly whatever was coming out of New York between 1979 and 1985 that fit that punk-jazz-avantgarde-minimalist sort of schtick, while RR+P were British, but personally, I think if you’re going to call No Wave a genre and not a scene, then RR+P fits, even if they’re considerably less noisy than some, and more complex than others in the No Wave genre). Ska is the evolutionary link between Mento and Reggae. Sure, some punks discovered Ska around ’78 and thus the Ska Punk fusion was born, but talking to a Ska purist about Ska Punk is like talking to a Metal purist about Glam Metal, and not even the watered-down, “can you really call it ‘metal’ of any sort any-more” crap, like Poison —a comparable band to a Ska aficionado would be No Doubt.
Shit You’ve Probably Read Already:
* P. Sufenas Virius Lupus’ “Burn Rome”
* and lastly, COMEEKS!
…SMBC: Socrates
Your New Old Word For the Week:
IDIOPATHIC: adjective, from Greek idiopatheia (idios-, one’s own, personal; -patheia, from paschein, to experience, suffer): 1. peculiar to an indicidual; 2. (of diseases) arising from an obscure or unknown cause. His idiopathic associations with that particular song by The Supremes led him to cry whenever it came on.
