pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ALL THAT FUCKING AND NO ART Joy Harjo's poem Remember concludes with these lines: Remember you are all people and all people I am trying to remember, but my life is filled with too many commitments right now and I am dancing at a dizzying pace in a mosh pit of commitments and bouncing into exhaustion and limitations—and the band ain't playing the Desiderata for me right now. (I don't understand how I did all this work and taught two graduate seminars last semester. When did I sleep? Do laundry? Strip that ugly-ass flowered wallpaper off the kitchen walls?) Yeah yeah, I know I'm overcommitted today because I played over the weekend, but I work sixty or more hours most weeks and flat-out refuse to just hand every bit of me over to the university. I want a full life. With time to write. And flirt. And laugh. And love. And go to the beach. And eat lobster. Worked hard most of Saturday, then went to drag bingo. The queens were grand and I won a game, which was cool—except they pulled this introvert up onstage and shoved a mic in my face and said "So what do you for a living?" Now, mind you, this was right after a drag queen doing a Madonna number ripped her pants off and threw them onto our table. And this seemed like the wrong venue in which to say "I direct an academic publishing program that rakes in over a million and a half bucks annually and teach two graduate seminars instead of sleeping," so I said "I make books." And now my friends won't quit picking on me about this. • Computergrrl came over today and asked about The Angry Painting (so named by the Ginger). I painted this one as a way to explore a horrific autopsy that I wish I had never witnessed. (I write about this in more detail in my entry Situational Ethics.) My short story The Color of Bruises explores this topic too, and I'll try to remember to post it soon. Anyway, the base layer of my painting is covered with newspaper articles about women who have been sexually or physically assaulted. I painted an eye chart on top of that, only the letters spell out Cunt Bitch Whore. There's blood and mud splashed over that. Then I screwed an adjustable window screen into the frame, cut a clear shower curtain into the shape of a spreadeagled woman with abbreviated (or removed) arms and legs, burned genitals into her with a Bic lighter, affixed a lock to her melted genitals, and dangled a set of keys off the lock to suggest possession/the prevalence of men who attempt to claim ownership of women who come under their gaze. Compact discs represent her breasts, and a few engineering tools from my old architectural design days represent the intricacies of her interior or the construction of her placement in the world. Two CDs represent her breasts. And I scribbled, in red ink across her translucent body, a sexist section of the Torah, Marge Piercy's Song of The Fucked Duck, and other lines condemning women. And I used a clock as her stomach to allude to life/the ticking clock. Finally, I shoved a screwdriver into the canvas, ripping it, and then I pounded it till the metal screwdriver post came through the top of the handle so that it looks like it went in with lots of force. This holds down one of the partial plastic arms. Then I wrapped wires and metal clamps around the entire body. It's a disturbing painting and I couldn't sleep in a room with it. But I really needed to get that experience out of my system and share a bit of the nightmare with a world that seems to focus instead on, say, the Williams and Sonoma catalog and trendy tattoos. Later, we drove a few towns over to watch the season finale (sob) of The L Word, which included this fabulous line:
All that fucking with no art is really rather boring, my dear. 7:35 p.m. - 2005-05-16 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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