02.21.07
Look! Look what I have!
You can get one too… they ship in just a week or so. Ask your favorite bookstore to order you a copy!
01.12.07
WOO!
Virgin just got a starred review in Publishers Weekly!
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6407200.html?nid=2286
Virgin: The Untouched History
Hanne Blank. Bloomsbury, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 978-1-59691-010-2“By any material reckoning, virginity does not exist,” writes Blank in this informative, funny and provocative analysis of one of the most elusive—and prized—qualities of human sexuality. Blank, an independent scholar, has pieced together a history of how humans have constructed the idea of virginity (almost always female and heterosexual) and engineered its uses to suit cultural and political forces. Blank has no shortage of fascinating facts: since Western virginity was symbolized by the color white, missionaries viewed nonwhite peoples as sexually immoral; late medieval and Renaissance moralists thought they could detect whether a woman was a virgin by examining her urine (”a virgin’s urine was clear, sparkling, and thin”). Blank also has a pleasing, highly readable style that allows her to convey large amounts of information with wit and agility. But she becomes most animated, and political, when she probes contemporary ideas about virginity. Taking on a range of questions—why is virginity considered sexy? how does the idea of virginity fuel violence against women?—she makes the case that contemporary culture is as obsessed with, and benighted about, virginity, as those of the past. Thoroughly researched, carefully argued and written with a sly sense of humor, this is a bright addition to the popular literature of women’s and cultural studies. (Mar.)
01.09.07
The Book Breakup
Ever since I started writing books I have been irritated, sometimes beyond all reasonable proportion, by the tendency to refer to the slump many writers go through after they finish a large project, for example a book, as “post-partum depression.”
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why the connection is drawn. Both pregnancy and book-writing are largely solitary processes that take a fairly sizeable length of time (though many books need to be baked for considerably longer than the average baby). Both pregnancy and book-writing are fated to end in the act of delivery that takes the more or less internal creation and brings it outward to the world, or at least to the editor, and hopefully thence to the world.
But in addition to the obvious issue of hormonal swing — and we should probably all be thankful, all things considered, that writers don’t also have to contend with the enormous hormone shifts that post-partum mothers do — there are a number of other reasons that I think characterizing post-writing-project slumps to post-partum depression is inaccurate, unhelpful, and frankly misapprehends what’s going on.
Consider this: there is an immediate, necessary, and consuming relationship between a mother and an infant that begins as soon as the baby is born. It is social, emotional, and physical, and it is, by comparison to the relatively passive and unilateral process of gestating a pregnancy, an enormously complicated series of interactions with another (somewhat inchoate but less so all the time) human being with its own opinions, needs, and desires. A new mother, unless she puts her infant up for adoption, lives with the end result of her pregnancy as not just some artifact of a lengthy process of creation, but as its own kicking, screaming, eating, pooping, needing independent self.
A book, in many ways, reverses both the sequence and the dynamic. A writer engages in an extremely active process of building a book, consciously creating it, shaping it, figuring it out, researching it, wrestling with its difficulties, coaxing it to do what the writer wants. It takes on a life of its own, existing as an entity in the writer’s mind and his or her life, a thing to which the writer devotes a great deal of time and energy on a daily basis, time and energy which can’t be used for other things. Just as rearing a small infant is not easily compatible with, say, the demands of any job that requires that one’s attention and physical presence be primarily focused on job tasks for lengthy periods of time, writing is also not compatible with those kinds of jobs. It is possible to think about writing here and there while one gets through one’s daily round of being, say, a nurse or a line cook or a telephone receptionist, and maybe it is even possible to do a little writing in the interstices of those jobs.
But it is not possible to write throughout the time that one does those kinds of work. The tasks are incompatible. The writing demands its own share of your time, your focus, your brain, your hands, during which you may also be, perhaps, cooking (in the oven or crockpot), doing laundry (in the machine), or some other automated task, but nothing to which you have to be paying attention. In point of fact, writing is also not very compatible with caring for small infants. Unless, of course, the infant in question happens to be asleep, in which case write like the wind, my darlings — I do know women who’ve written entire books or dissertations during the intervals that their infants were napping, so it is clear that writing and infant care can be combined, but sequentially, not simultaneously.
By contrast, it is quite possible to be pregnant whilst being a nurse or a line cook or a telephone receptionist, or a writer for that matter, because pregnancy doesn’t require too much of one’s conscious involvement for creation to happen. Pregnancies are rather inexorably biological, and in some ways they are something that happens to people, not something that people do. A pregnancy will, if all goes well, simply do its thing without the mother-to-be having to lift a finger to steer — indeed she cannot lift a finger to steer, the rudder that steers the process is not available to her, and if all does not go well she still can’t really do anything about it of her own self, and certainly not through mental effort alone. I mean, if you want to, you may stop writing a book one afternoon and simply quit in mid-sentence of your own volition and without having to involve anybody else at all, the thought and the deed perhaps even instantaneous. Just you try that with a pregnancy.
So no, books are not pregnancies and pregnancies are not books. Books are much more like intensely high-maintenance love affairs, or perhaps even dysfunctional marriages, than they are like pregnancies. Books exist, necessarily, on your level: they must, since they are the products of your intellect. They are highly (!) verbal, and cannot exist without communication. They in fact consist entirely of communication, and thus of choices of how to communicate and what to communicate and why. They have the extraordinary ability to poke you right in your most sensitive and least well-calibrated buttons, and to make you all but turn yourself inside out doing whatever you can possibly think of to do to get them to work with you and say or do the right thing. They sometimes stalk you and pester you, but more often you have to be the one in pursuit with coaxing and pleading and confrontations and dinner reservations and flowers and simple bullheaded consistent showing up on the doorstep hat in hand and willing to talk it all out, if you want the relationship to continue to exist at all.
If you’re lucky, this relationship will flourish to the extent that the book will get written, and then revised. Some people have a really difficult time letting go of books when they’ve finally managed to suss out the requirements of the relationship enough to get to that point. Some people revise for as long as humanly possible, smoothing the rough edges where the difficulty of the relationship shows, until they’ve rubbed all the nap from the velvet as it were. But most of us, and particularly those of us who are obliged to turn over our books to agents and editors in order to earn what passes for a living, do all this courting and seducing and explaining and pursuing and explaining and explaining and explaining only to get the book to the point where it is not perhaps Completely and Definitively Done but sufficiently done… and then it’s over.
It’s over. Printed out, shoved in a box, sent off to New York City with a few drops of bourbon sprinkled over it and a whispered “write if you get work, little book!” or whatever ritual of parting one prefers. Perhaps just e-mailed, these days. If one is fortunate, one gets notified when it shows up.
And then there’s silence. The space where there has for months, maybe even years, been this constant flow of verbiage, this incessant back-and-forth of ideas, this continual emotional and intellectual exchange has not merely gone empty, the space itself has ceased to be. It’s in a box in New York City. You can’t dip your foot in the same river twice and you can’t write the same book twice either. Even if you try.
It’s gone, daddy, gone.
That’s the nature of the post-book slump, or depression, or ennui, or whatever you want to call it. It’s not birth, it’s a breakup, the kind where the bed’s too damn big and the afternoon is too quiet and you go out for a walk and something scary or funny or just plain strange happens and before you know it you’ve gotten out your cellphone and started to dial and then taken a deep breath and hit the little red “hang up” button instead because that’s not the person you call to tell about that stuff, any more.
And you know you’ll see them later. You’ll have to make arrangements to have brunch sometime, so you can trade plastic grocery bags of borrowed books and forgotten sweaters and say embarrassing things like “I, um, threw out your toothbrush” and “I got mocha latte all over your David Bowie CD but I washed it off and it still plays okay” and “I’m sorry I said that thing about your brother.”
Eventually you’ll see them out somewhere, all dressed up and looking sharp and sexy in some bookstore-cafe, and you’ll say hi and you’ll hug and you’ll feel their familiar shape in your hands but there’s all that distance now and don’t you see? It can never be the same again. Never the way it was when they were yours. And sometimes that means you’ll see them more clearly, and be embarrassed by the way they talk or the fact that they never seem to realize when their panty lines are showing, stuff that never bothered you before but now you wonder how you could ever have missed it. But you’ll still miss them, and the way it was then, before things changed.
Unless. Unless they’re the Evil Ex and you couldn’t get rid of them fast enough because they were, quite simply, that evil. But these are thankfully rare.
Still very unlike babies, though.
12.15.06
A Hanukkah present for my Belovedary
P’an Ku’s Companions,
Or,
Where You Come From
By Hanne Blank, based on Taoist creation myths
For Malcolm, Chanukah 2006 / 5767
A long time ago, so long ago that there was not even such a thing as time, before the sun stretched for the first time and felt its bones glowing bright and hot, the Universe was a vast blank Nothing.
In the Nothing it was not light, it was not dark, it was not clear, it was not foggy, it was simply nothing. Endless nothing, nothing at all. There was no curve to the nothing, no walls, not even the suggestion of a shape, and no time either, nothing that would tell you how long ago it had been or how far in the future it might be, only a single unending moment so dense in its nothingness that when Something finally appeared in the Nothing, the Nothing didn’t even notice it.
The Something noticed, though. Huge and majestic, it noticed in its sleep. Eyelids so large they looked as if they had been stitched out of blue whales’ bellies fluttered but did not open. There was a booming grunt, a colossal fart. Then the Something rolled over, cocooned within swirls of chaos and spouts of sound and skeins of primal Stuff, all of which swaddled the Something head to toe. The Something, the Stuff, the chaos, and all the rest, even the grunts and farts, were in turn contained within a vast eggshell.
The Egg was not contained in anything at all. For eighteen thousand years — or so people say — the Egg waited in the Nothing while the Something slept. Every so often the Something would shift position, and drift close to the surface of the water of Dream that it sensed the Nothing beyond its eggshell bed, but there was no reason to wake up yet.
Until there was.
The Something opened its eyes, blinking away the crusts of symphonies yet-to-be, the someday breakfasts of kings and concubines, and future seaside villages. It yawned, and the cataclysm of sounds within the eggshell arrayed itself in sympathy, vibrating the eggshell so madly that a crack opened up in the shell.
The Something could feel the crack in the Egg like you feel a change in the weather. The pressure of the Stuff rushing toward the crack, compelled by its nature to go toward the Nothing, made his ears pop and his skin tingle. The Egg itself, heretofore a silent player in the drama, gave a shuddering, juddering, miles-long moan of weary yearning.
Oh well, the Something thought. No time like the present.
The Something kicked out with one mighty foot, a foot as big as Chomolungma, on the end of a leg as long as the Amazon, and smashed the eggshell into a million times a million luminous shards.
The chaos rushed out. The sound rushed out. The Stuff rushed out. Glittering fragments of eggshell flew into the Nothing, turning end over end like certain sorts of leaves. And everywhere the chaos went, everywhere the sound went, everywhere the Stuff went, everywhere the eggshell went, they left trails of Something behind them.
In the middle of it all was the Something, titanic and naked. His broad face gleaming and his mighty arms outstretched, he spun madly, fingers splayed, in the middle of what had formerly been the void but now contained him, P’an Ku.
As he got over the shock of it, P’an Ku looked around. The new place was exciting and noisy and busy. It would be impossible to sleep, now. Everything was rushing all over everywhere, now that there was an everywhere for it to rush all over. P’an Ku was spattered all over with globs of it. He wiped Stuff and fragments of eggshell out of his eyes and winkled it out of his ear with a pinky finger. No sooner had he cleaned his face off than another clot of Stuff as big as England hit him square between the eyes.
This will never do, P’an Ku thought as he recovered from the blow. He might have said it aloud but he didn’t want to open his mouth under the circumstances. Instead he started sorting.
P’an Ku plucked Stuff from the air as it passed him, caught sounds as they flew. He snatched scraps of shining eggshell as they hurtled by, and snagged hanks of chaos without even looking. The work made him happy. It seemed to be what he was meant to do.
P’an Ku rolled the Stuff into neat balls, some larger, some smaller. decorating them with fantastic, rich, lush arrangements of sound, and wrapping some of them in lovely complicated webs of chaos, all anchored firmly in the Stuff lest it come loose again. The eggshell bits he put in his mouth, feeling the powerful tingling of them slowly penetrate his whole head until his ears buzzed and his eyes glowed. Now and then he would grin just because it was so amusing how the light of the dazzling eggshell pieces shone through the spaces between his teeth.
Eventually P’an Ku had collected and sorted everything that had come out of the Egg when he cracked it open. Exhausted after all his work, P’an Ku looked around glumly. The last time he slept he had had the Egg to lie down in. Now there was no place to lie down.
What to do? Poor P’an Ku was all alone, with nothing but a mouthful of eggshell and a collection of Stuff-balls, hovering in the deep dark black of space. He still had to figure out what to do with his wonderful collections, his carefully-crafted orbs and his mouthful of luminous eggshell. But he was so weary that his magnificent bones ached. He needed rest before he could continue. So P’an Ku tried to lay down where he was.
This worked, after a fashion, and P’an Ku relaxed, wrapped arms like peninsulas around a torso broad as a desert, and began to shut his eyes. Whereupon a Stuff-ball thwacked him hard in the back of the head. He sat up, clapping a hand across his Grand Canyon mouth lest he give in to the temptation to shout and lose all the eggshell bits.
When P’an Ku looked around he could see that his Stuff-balls, no longer corralled, had gone spinning off into space, and were caroming about wildly just as the Stuff and the chaos and the sound and the eggshell had before.
Fine, thought the exhausted P’an Ku, if that’s the way the Stuff is going to behave, I’ll just have to show it who’s boss.
Rallying the scrag-ends of his strength, P’an Ku began to round up Stuff-balls, leaping through space to catch them in their flight. Each time he caught one, he would mash it into a wad with the others, forming a huge ball of Stuff that got bigger and bigger and bigger with each captured ball, chaos and sound interleaved throughout the enlarging mass, no longer elegant but crushed together willy-nilly.
The more Stuff-balls P’an Ku caught, though, the further he had to go to catch the next, because they were still bouncing and flying, still drawn by the inexorable tendency of Stuff to go where there is none. Too, P’an Ku was carrying his enormous amalgamated ball of Stuff, which rapidly became even larger than he. Because P’an Ku was mighty, he kept carrying it, even when his ball began to dwarf him, and because P’an Ku was determined, he kept hurrying after the missing Stuff-balls while carrying his gigantic prize.
Eventually, though, poor P’an Ku could catch no more. He was simply too tired. By this time, though, his collection had formed a Stuff-ball so huge that even P’an Ku realized it would crush him flat if it should hit him in his sleep. So instead of taking the risk of having the enormous Stuff-ball land on top of him, P’an Ku decided that the solution was for him to get on top of the Stuff-ball.
Depleted to the point that his eyelids sagged and his knees wobbled, P’an Ku stood precariously atop his huge ball. He looked out into the black, dimly able to see hints of faraway rogue Stuff-balls, and sighed so hard that the Essence of Life itself was knocked from its fragile moorings within him. Eyes popping fully open in surprise, P’an Ku watched the slender blue wriggling form of the Essence of Life as it danced away into the black, then toppled onto his back, dead as stones.
Instantly a fountain of light erupted from P’an Ku’s head. His mouth, knocked open by the fall, released its glowing shards of primordial eggshell and they plumed up and up and out into the black, spangling the length of space with stars. The stars lit up the body of the dead P’an Ku, half-buried in the soft Stuff he had collected, smeared with chaos.
Blood ran from his ears, turning clear as it hit the surface of the Stuff-ball, running in rivulets and rivers, collecting in ponds and lakes and even seas. The Essence of Life, drawn by the promising sound of rushing water, came to watch, and her delighted dance made P’an Ku’s thick black hair grow leaves and bark, flowers erupting from its whorls. Even the hair on his toes turned to grass that waved in the breezes and winds that had been set in motion by P’an Ku’s final great sigh. As massive in death as he had been in life, P’an Ku’s flesh turned to stone, his bones to precious jewels, his nerves to veins of gold and silver, which is why the most precious gems and metals are found deep underground, layered in the rock.
By and by, probably through the mad whirling whispers of the Essence of Life, who is the only entity to travel between our Universe and the Realm of the August Personage of Jade whenever she will, word of the magnificent P’an Ku traveled to the Court of the Immortals.
“Hm,” mused the dragon goddess Nü-Kua, preening her beautiful blue body so that it shone almost as brightly as the eternal glow of the heavens. “That sounds like something I would like to see.”
With a flick of her powerful tail, Nü-Kua set off to the resting place of the great P’an Ku, navigating by the stars until she found him.
“Such a beautiful world he made!” she cried, marveling at the greens and blues and browns and golds and reds of it, at the steep majesty of the mountains that were P’an Ku’s body, at the delicious sensation of grass beneath her Divine feet. Nü-Kua swam in the lakes and proclaimed them beautiful and worthy too. She flew through the clouds and proclaimed them beautiful and worthy, too. Nü-Kua warmed herself in the sands of the fiery deserts and cooled herself lingering on the glittering ice shelves of the polar zones. For fun, she raced around the equator, chasing her own tail until she got dizzy and fell giggling into the warm, salty sea.
“The only thing wrong with this world,” Nü-Kua said as she floated on her back in the sea, churning up enormous waves with her superlative tail, “is that there is no one here to enjoy it but me, and I cannot stay forever. When I go back to the Realm of the August Personage of Jade, there will be no one here to keep poor P’an Ku company.”
Nü-Kua swam to shore. Taking mud from the coastal flats, she began to sculpt creatures. With care and precision, Nü-Kua shaped myriad creatures out of the stiff mud: fish and horses, spiders and ducks, gorillas and dogs, elephants and dung beetles, mudskippers and platypuses. Every kind of creature that walks or crawls or creeps or leaps or flies or swims, Nü-Kua made it with her long careful dragon fingers, lining them up at the water’s edge.
Nü-Kua took a step back and regarded her creations. There were almost enough, she thought, but not quite. Scooping up some more mud, she sculpted three more creatures: a woman, a man, and a cat.
“There,” Nü-Kua said, finally pleased. “That’s exactly what was needed. Now P’an Ku will always have company.” With that, Nü-Kua leaned down and breathed her Divine breath into every last one of the creatures, opening their bodies so that the Essence of Life could find a place within them to inhabit. Nü-Kua reached out to the heavens and beckoned to the Essence of Life, who rushed to explore all these new things, and one by one, all the world’s creatures were brought to life.
Having seen to it that P’an Ku would not lack companionship, and having seen all there was to see of the world, Nü-Kua made ready to return to the Realm of the August Personage of Jade. Just then she felt a tiny tap on her left forefoot and looked down to see what it was. It was the Man she had made, kneeling before her in fear, awe, and confusion.
“Please, Great Goddess,” the Man said, “Can you help me? I am so small and this place is so big and I’m afraid I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
Nü-Kua nodded, pity welling up in her heart. She had made him rather tiny, hadn’t she, compared to the size of P’an Ku’s world. Why, even had she made a thousand more like the Man, then crammed them all together in a bundle, they wouldn’t be even as big as P’an Ku’s littlest toe. The poor thing was going to need a sense of Purpose if he was going to survive. So Nü-Kua lifted the Man up to eye level and looked him over carefully, then gently brought the trembling creature to her lips. With the tiniest kiss she could manage, she imparted Purpose to the Man, then set him gently back down again.
Now Nü-Kua turned her attention to the Woman, who sat on a fallen tree trunk, playing with the cat with a long piece of grass. It would never do, Nü-Kua thought, to give a gift to the Man without giving a gift to the Woman as well, how unfair! But it was also perfectly clear to Nü-Kua that the woman already had a sense of Purpose, though where she’d gotten it from even Nü-Kua didn’t know.
Nü-Kua thought about it for a moment, then realized she knew exactly what to give the Woman. Nü-Kua encircled the woman’s shoulders with the tip of her tail, so as not to disturb her ability to play with the cat, and with a twitch of her inmost Divine essence, transmitted the gift of Endurance to the Woman.
The woman felt it and smiled, looking up and over her shoulder at the spiraling blue beauty of Nü-Kua. “Thank you,” said the Woman. “That will certainly be useful. I am eternally in your debt, mighty Nü-Kua.”
The Woman bowed deeply from her seat on the log, and when she straightened, she looked up at the dragon goddess again. Nü-Kua’s right eyebrow arched in question, sending sparkling rays of iridescent light arcing crazily across the seashore.
“I was just wondering, O beautiful, O powerful Nü-Kua, about the Cat,” the Woman said. “Have you no gift to give such a marvelous creature as this?”
“The Cat,” answered Nü-Kua with the faintest hint of a smile, “has everything it needs already.”
With that, Nü-Kua lifted her long splendid body into the air and flew off into the stars, guiding herself through and beyond the stars, back to the Realm of the August Personage of Jade.
12.09.06
Blogging from the Bridge
By rights, this entry should probably begin “Captain’s Log, Stardate such-and-such.” Why? Well, fortunately for all of us including him, it isn’t because I am channeling William Shatner. Rather it has to do with how I am writing this entry.
With a pen. On a plastic tablet. Just like Yeoman Rand, but not with that hair. I can’t rock that complicated a wig at 8 am on a Saturday.
The tablet is something called a Wacom Graphire tablet, and the pen is an induction stylus that goes with it, and both were an early Chanukah gift from my Belovedary, who reasoned that perhaps my RSl issues might be helped by my having alternate input devices for my computer, enabling me to vary my arm and hand movements more. So far so good, although I must note in the interest of full disclosure that it is now possible, should a person get a little manic about keeping a deathgrip on one’s stylus, to get writers’ cramp from using the computer.
I rather like handwriting into my computer, though. There’s something about it that profoundly satisfies my innermost Luddite. It is much slower than typing, partly because it is, and partly because the character recognition takes time, and then going through what you’ve written to make sure the character recognition was correct (varies, depending on your handwriting and on the vocabulary you use; it tends not to recognize unfamiliar words as well as familiar ones, etc.) takes more time. But there are some nice things about having it be slower: one thinks more, or at least I find that I do, while writing. It’s one of the things I like about using manual typewriters, too. They just slow you down a little bit.
In other news-you-can’t-probably-use, the bathroom entropy situation is significantly improved although not yet completely rectified. We were able to shower yesterday, though not without the adjunct of some duct-taped plastic sheeting over critical bits that have yet to be retiled. I can’t tell you how jolly it was to be able to take a shower without worrying that I was secretly soaking the (ugly, but you know, we’re not yet in a position to replace it, so not ready to ruin it) kitchen’s drop-ceiling, or worse, shortcircuiting the kitchen ceiling lights.
Still, I am superstitious and paranoid about things for a while when my house has gone crumbly on me, even after I fix things (we replaced our roof two years ago, almost, and I still run up to check that things aren’t leaking when it rains heavily, because we spent three grand on a rubber roof with a 20 year materials warranty and I’m paranoid), so I took a short shower, did not shave my legs, and then ran downstairs to the kitchen as soon as I was dry so I could check and make sure that nothing was leaking. Because you never know, it could be leaking secretly. Just to vex me.