A Dyke A Broad #47
On rotating your tires, rethinking your activist traveling companions, and the plus-que-parfait in French.
Hello from Paris!
At least I think that’s where I am. All I can see from my windows are grey clouds and apartment blocks that could be anywhere. Which I know I’ve said before. Still, it’s disorienting. Like having autumn weather all summer. Or watching the news which seems to be on a repeat of twenty year cycles from the mess in Afghanistan to the purity police in full swing in the U.S.
A Quick Mea Culpa
I spent the first part of the week annoyed with myself and that last newsletter, which bordered on the usual activist schlock, demanding readers care about this, take action on that. Probably you’d seen a hundred pieces already encouraging you to feel this thing, think this thing, sign this thing, fund this thing for women and Afghanistan. A link would have been enough, a photo. Just so you’d know I was thinking about it. Though probably I didn’t need to say so. What if I hadn’t? And hadn’t remarked on the headlines? Would you really think I didn’t care?
So much for my goal of avoiding the essay-equivalent of the fist defiantly and angrily raised in front of a barricade which we pretend is a sign of radical protest, but is just another way to submit. Sometimes to goodness. Sometimes to groupthink. Always to moral and political certainty. Which is both corrupt and corrupting, though maybe calcifying is better as a metaphor. An emotional cataract. Cloudiness. A film covering things so gradually we don’t notice that we’ve outsourced our politics, our emotions, even our attention, let me not say thought, which we abandon entirely to other people, or sometimes our past selves.
I keep being surprised that the people or the movements I supported in 1992 or 2002 changed without me noticing, like a train switching tracks, while I kept on obediently raising my fist, and persisting in the unfounded belief that they would hold their course. Now, twenty years later I wake up to discover that lessssbians are Enemy #1 and they hate our guts. Though maybe they always did, and I was too naive to notice. Ooopsie.
It would be great if we could get periodic reminders to reconsider our positions and our comrades, like checking the oil or rotating the tires of a car. I have to remind myself that even the activist tactics we used a generation ago may no longer work, or work the way we expect. And why should they? Our enemies have changed. Like viruses do. They become resistant. Which means we need to pause occasionally and consider how things shift. Leave room for interrogation and doubt, and especially to question the idea that action, that motion is always and immediately required, that there is no time to pause. Reconsider. Reflect. Dream. Figure out what we really value and how to get it.
On My Shitty French
Besides sulking, and resenting my knee-jerk self, I started studying for a French assessment test. I’m fascinated by how much weight they give to grammar—which I screw up all the time because I never really studied the language, just started learning it haphazardly when we did an apartment swap in 2005. I’d go to the local library and pick up a mystery, or a book on cheese, another on wine, and read them line-by-line with a dictionary. After several months I had an interesting vocabulary of tannins, molds, and shell casings, though not much grammar. (What the hell is pluperfect anyway?)
I only learned to write when I was keeping a diary in English and French started to intrude— leading to the little book, Letters from Exile, I’ve started serializing on Thursdays.
At any rate I have to do a French test, because a certain level of competency is required for citizenship—something I’ll be applying for soon. I took one once, and ended up with a really high rating by mistake, because I had a killer migraine and for the last several minutes the words were swimming so meaninglessly on the overly bright screen, that I picked answers at random.
I won’t be so lucky this time. The last practice test tells me that I’m back to my mid-level grades which according to them mean I can do basic things like buy groceries, but not understand or communicate complex ideas. A conclusion the program reached because I used the wrong form of verbs in two answers, the wrong preposition in another. So I couldn’t possibly understand anything important.
Apparently, the people who extrapolate your functional level of French from these tests have never been immigrants. Or even read the shitty grammar in emails from actual native French speakers. To be fair, there’s plenty of Americans who hear even a tiny accent and assume the speaker is a half-wit. Not in New York City though, where I spent half my life.
One of my favorite NYC things is how you go down the street and sometimes pass three or four people having a heated discussion, which maybe started with complaints about how the city is doing something stupid again with garbage collection, but segues into a political analysis of the incompetent administration at large. Or maybe it will be about the construction people on the corner that are fucking things up so badly that the building next door is in risk of collapse. All of the speakers are waving their hands and talking a hundred miles an hour in English, which is their second or third language, after Spanish or Polish, Bengali or Chinese, and despite their big accents and challenged grammar they understand and fluently express complex thoughts totally characteristic of assimilated, and extremely cranky, apocalyptic-minded New Yorkers.
God, I miss New York sometimes.
What I’ve been looking at…
40 Heartbreaking Works By The First Female Afghan Street Artist
She got into it in 2010 after going to a graffiti workshop led by UK artist CHU. Since then, Hassani has developed a unique style and painted her trademark character -- a woman with her eyes shut and no mouth -- all over the country.
Women erased from the history of the Bauhaus movement.
While women were allowed into the German school—and its manifesto stated that it welcomed “any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex”—a strong gender bias still informed its structure. Female students, for instance, were encouraged to pursue weaving rather than male-dominated mediums like painting, carving, and architecture. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius encouraged this distinction through his vocal belief that men thought in three dimensions, while women could only handle two.
‘It Was Like I’d Never Done It Before’: How Sally Rooney Wrote Again
What it comes down to, for her — and for Henry James and the Victorians, and even Felix — is some inherent, transformative value in aesthetic experience. “I want to live in a culture where people are making art, even as everything else falls apart,” Rooney said. “It gives my life meaning.”
And don’t forget…
The amazing disappearing lesbian...
And last, but not least, Dr. Jessica Taylor’s 37 questions to prove that systemic misandry doesn’t exist. (Scroll down on that page).
1. Can you name 1 instance of an all-female terrorist regime that has committed acts of mass rape and murder towards boys and men who they deem inferior?
2. Can you name 1 instance where a group of female terrorists abducted hundreds of little boys from their school, to traffic them for sex?
3. Can you name 1 female led country in the world where it is illegal for men to drive a car or have a driving licence because they are perceived as too stupid?
5. Can you name 1 female led country in the world where men are not allowed to leave their houses without a female chaperone?
That’s it for this week,
Disgruntledly yours,
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