Pull that oar until it cracks

[sovay]

And then today I got up on two hours of sleep and spent the day at Canobie Lake Park with derspatchel, sairaali, M., M's brother C., rushthatspeaks, gaudior, jinian, and B. It was wonderful.

I was last there as a small child in the '80's; I recognized the miniature sports cars and the narrow gauge railway, but the Kosmojets and the Matterhorn are gone. The mirror maze looked familiar. I remembered the red-and-white skyway that makes a circuit over some of the family rides once I was on it. Everything else was new to me.

I rode three coasters: Untamed, the Yankee Cannonball (twice), and the Canobie Corkscrew (twice, the last time to close out the day; it is a small coaster and it does one thing, but it does that one thing extremely well). The Xtreme Frisbee looked like a close cousin to the Big E's Fireball, which I love and find exhilarating, but it actually blurred my sense of balance in a way I hadn't experienced before, so I didn't give it another chance. The Ferris Giant Sky Wheel got two rides, the second at sunset right before the midway started to light up. So did the Mine of Lost Souls, a gonzo dark ride that starts like a tour of a haunted mine and then falls sideways into a different genre. We rode the Caterpillar and the sky ride of my childhood and the swing carousel called Da Vinci's Dream. I avoided the Policy Pond Log Flume and the other water rides because I was already freezing; the day was bright and nippy and I spent all of my time in my jacket, mostly with my hair stuffed down the back to keep it out of the wind. I also stayed away from the Psychodrome, because the idea of a scrambler ride with loud music and strobe lights was a migraine waiting to happen. The half-hour cruise around Canobie Lake was lovely. Half of my food intake for the day seems to have been ice cream in the form of Dippin' Dots and butterscotch-dipped vanilla soft-serve and the other half was some surprisingly tasty pulled pork and the bowl of clam chowder I ate as soon as I got home (after feeding the cats, who otherwise seemed to think the chowder was a special present for them). I appear to have a sunburn across my cheekbones despite putting on sunscreen. We missed the antique carousel, but that just leaves something to go back for.

Saira had made a road trip playlist, from which I learned that Heather Dale went through a phase of recording songs about shipwrecks; I suspect I need them.

I am physically very tired. However temporarily, I'm happy.

Comments

Re: what's with Marge Piercy's politics

[sovay]

She signed a TERF manifesto a couple of years ago ("Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Critiques of Gender").

Aaagh.

Re: what's with Marge Piercy's politics

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

Aaagh.

Yes, exactly. You have perfectly summed up my sentiment on the subject. This was the point at which I stopped buying and reading her work, whereas previously she had been on my 'buy it whenever you can' list. For what it's worth, I've always bounced off her poems, with a few exceptions. I have seen some nice excerpts in places, but I bought The Art of Blessing the Day and bounced pretty thoroughly.

He, She and It was the first book of hers I read, at the age of 15, so she was something of a hero to me, growing up with her progressive gender-exploratory writing, particularly Woman on the Edge of Time which had proto-polyamory, bisexuality, and thoughts about gender non-judgmentally braided in alongside modern Judiasm, and idea about working through the mistakes we make in the throes of revolutionary zeal (I may be conflating in parts of Braided Lives and Vida, it's been more that 2 decades since re-read. On the whole, I still recommend the books, but with the heavy reservation that her subsequent action brings into the picture.

Do watch Dropbox for further updates to your music library.

Re: what's with Marge Piercy's politics

[sovay]

On the whole, I still recommend the books, but with the heavy reservation that her subsequent action brings into the picture.

Fortunately, it is possible to read an author's books without sending them money for it (if they're in libraries, anyway). Are her earlier politics consistent with her later behavior, or was it one of those distressing shifts where you always thought of them as progressive until they weren't?

Do watch Dropbox for further updates to your music library.

Thank you!

Re: what's with Marge Piercy's politics

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

Are her earlier politics consistent with her later behavior, or was it one of those distressing shifts where you always thought of them as progressive until they weren't?

Pretty much that, at least from my perspective. I mean, it's not like I knew her as a person, it was just that I'd read her books and then I read about her public act of signing onto something I found hateful.

Woman on the Edge of Time has an sympathetic androgynous character, and deals fairly and rationally with mental illness, and it's radically feminist/equalist. Her other work has constructed sapients that have gender, and modified people who have gender, so it's just hard to reconcile the breadth of understanding it must have taken to create those people with the sheer lack of empathy from later on.

Thank you!

You're welcome. I trust things have made their short transit to you.

Re: what's with Marge Piercy's politics

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I think it's a case of "I was thinking about this stuff before you were born, so therefore I Must Be Right Full Stop Forget Your Lived Experiences."

I hope I never do that to people younger than I am, and that if I do I will have the grace to apologize.