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But when can a broken glass mend?
I had a wonderful time at the NYRSF reading tonight.
I read "When Can a Broken Glass Mend?", because it is newly reprinted and queer and Jewish and other things I want visible especially these days; I read poems from Ghost Signs and an assortment of uncollected and unpublished poems, concluding with the political one I wrote a few days ago in the aftershock of the election. Jim Freund asked permission to excerpt it for a WBAI show coming up. Of course I said yes. I talked about film noir, Aeolic Greek, radio telescopes, the danger of imagining yourself into the past rather than in it. After the intermission raffle (which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ladymondegreen won half of), Kij Johnson read excerpts from The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe (2016), which contains strange things in the sea and a small black cat. I will be picking up a copy of my own. I ended up signing my printout of "Vocatio" for her. I talked far too little with Rob Cameron. Merav brought us chocolate and a beautiful little print of a Good Decision Cat; I was glad to hear that her pomegranate trees are inside for the winter. We went out afterward to find real food for derspatchel—I had eaten a bagel with lox and cream cheese before the reading—and fetched up at a Shake Shack, where all the concretes are entirely different regional in-jokes from the ones in Harvard Square. I brought eight copies of Ghost Signs with me and I only have to carry three back.
Now I am going to shower, because we got up to catch the Amtrak Regional this morning at whatschreibergasse rightly calls the ass crack of dawn and I did not manage to do more than doze for about half an hour on the train (mostly in southern Connecticut), though we did fall over stupefied for about two hours once we finally got to Brooklyn and my mother's cousin's house. Right after my last post, we started to pass the salt marshes, fox-colored brushes of saltgrass and plates of soft pewter water in a luminous mist. In New London, I saw a red-and-black cargo ship called the Geneva Venture being loaded or unloaded beneath what I thought were four canary-yellow derricks on the dock, which turned out to belong to the ship—a bulk carrier—herself. The internet informed me she sails out of Hong Kong. I like trains. I like ships at sea. I like New York City, which is not my home, but which has always been very good to me. I like other people's words and I like that I write my own. These things are important. These things are especially important when the rest of the landscape looks like lowering dystopia with a chance of apocalypse in the late afternoon.
I need to remember: right now, I am glad to be here.
I read "When Can a Broken Glass Mend?", because it is newly reprinted and queer and Jewish and other things I want visible especially these days; I read poems from Ghost Signs and an assortment of uncollected and unpublished poems, concluding with the political one I wrote a few days ago in the aftershock of the election. Jim Freund asked permission to excerpt it for a WBAI show coming up. Of course I said yes. I talked about film noir, Aeolic Greek, radio telescopes, the danger of imagining yourself into the past rather than in it. After the intermission raffle (which
ladymondegreen won half of), Kij Johnson read excerpts from The Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe (2016), which contains strange things in the sea and a small black cat. I will be picking up a copy of my own. I ended up signing my printout of "Vocatio" for her. I talked far too little with Rob Cameron. Merav brought us chocolate and a beautiful little print of a Good Decision Cat; I was glad to hear that her pomegranate trees are inside for the winter. We went out afterward to find real food for derspatchel—I had eaten a bagel with lox and cream cheese before the reading—and fetched up at a Shake Shack, where all the concretes are entirely different regional in-jokes from the ones in Harvard Square. I brought eight copies of Ghost Signs with me and I only have to carry three back.Now I am going to shower, because we got up to catch the Amtrak Regional this morning at what
schreibergasse rightly calls the ass crack of dawn and I did not manage to do more than doze for about half an hour on the train (mostly in southern Connecticut), though we did fall over stupefied for about two hours once we finally got to Brooklyn and my mother's cousin's house. Right after my last post, we started to pass the salt marshes, fox-colored brushes of saltgrass and plates of soft pewter water in a luminous mist. In New London, I saw a red-and-black cargo ship called the Geneva Venture being loaded or unloaded beneath what I thought were four canary-yellow derricks on the dock, which turned out to belong to the ship—a bulk carrier—herself. The internet informed me she sails out of Hong Kong. I like trains. I like ships at sea. I like New York City, which is not my home, but which has always been very good to me. I like other people's words and I like that I write my own. These things are important. These things are especially important when the rest of the landscape looks like lowering dystopia with a chance of apocalypse in the late afternoon.I need to remember: right now, I am glad to be here.
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Thank you.
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The phrasing of this made me smile.
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Thank you!
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Hee.
I have definitely had days that disappeared up their own cracks of dawn.
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Thank you. It was great.
I'll be back in January for the Bestiary reading; I will hope to see you then!
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Thank you.
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What do you make of the high rate of Jewish voter support for Trump? Personally I just want to bitch-slap a whole lot of people, but I'm not at all surprised.
That President Pussygrabber has put forward a vocal anti-Semite for a prominent administrative post seems only to be expected.
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Thank you for the statistics.
[edit] Speaking of . . .
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During the campaign, I read an illuminating article about Trump, anti-Semitism, and the American Jewish right wing which I always forget exists, because it makes no sense to me that it should. (This is almost certainly a factor of my own upbringing and politics. I have never understood, either, the belief that criticism of Israel automatically and intrinsically equals anti-Semitism, including by Jews—I understand that the two can be run together, and often are, and I certainly don't believe it is invalid for the State of Israel to exist in the first place, but I've wanted a meteor to hit Netanyahu for at least the last ten years and I'm pretty sure that does not make me a self-hating Jew.) I imagine that most of Trump's Jewish votes were based on his social conservatism and whatever stance he espouses on Israel, probably the same kind of support it garners among the Evangelicals. Since Christian Zionism is rooted in Biblical eschatology and implicitly presupposes things like the conversion of the Jews and Armageddon, I find it generally creepy. Other people feel differently, including I believe the State of Israel itself—American Protestantism offers allies. I might feel differently if I had been raised in a less diaspora-minded family. As it is, the idea of even Orthodox Jews voting for Trump occasions the same kind of cognitive dissonance in me as women voting for Trump, or anyone of any non-white ethnicity voting for him. There had to be something he offered that was worth more than all the crass hateful bullying. I just don't in all cases know what it was.
That President Pussygrabber has put forward a vocal anti-Semite for a prominent administrative post seems only to be expected.
It is not surprising in that he is conducting his pre-Presidency in exactly the same tenor in which he ran his campaign. It would just have been nice if even a little of that had been razzle-dazzle for the crowds, not a straight-up preview.
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I am reminded about the Jewish right that it basically controlled the government of Israel for many years. And yeah, I've had the "self-hating" libel slung at me by Jews for years.
the idea of even Orthodox Jews voting for Trump occasions the same kind of cognitive dissonance in me as women voting for Trump, or anyone of any non-white ethnicity voting for him. There had to be something he offered that was worth more than all the crass hateful bullying. I just don't in all cases know what it was.
I am convinced this is an example of ideology-beats-identity. I'm still thrashing this around in my head, but roughly I think that a minority person, particularly one from a disfavored minority, is more likely to bind strongly to their identity as that identity offers some level of solace and shelter from societal oppression. A person from a more favored group feels less need to bind to that identity and so often goes with people of different identities but like ideology.
I don't think this explains the entirety of the vote for Trump by any means but I'm convinced it's a major factor.
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Explain with examples?
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Their ideology (anti-abortion) is more important than their identity as women and solidarity with a woman candidate.
It's my impression that these voters tend to be more white, and live in areas where their community and lifestyle shields them from things such as wage discrimination and job discrimination that more often affect women of color, women who head households, and women who are full-time employed outside the home.
Another example (since I'm on the abortion issue) is Latinx voters who chose Trump. I hypothesize that these voters are more likely to be Catholic or otherwise have strong religious ideologies that caused them to back the candidate they saw as closer to those ideologies despite his denigration of their Latinx identity.
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Thank you! It was just really fun.
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Your descriptions of the trees and water are so lovely. I always love taking the train in this region; there's such wonderful landscapes to look at.
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Thank you! I hope you're feeling better now. Like I told
Your descriptions of the trees and water are so lovely.
Thank you. I try to be accurate about the world.
I always love taking the train in this region; there's such wonderful landscapes to look at.
Yes. When I lived in New Haven and took regular trains to New York and Boston, I was never bored with the traveling. There were always the salt marshes and the sea.
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Thank you! That sounds lovely, and I'll definitely try and make it.
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Yay!