A Dyke A Broad #88
Finding my way to Rome. A struggling Macron, and links including a piece on anti-women feminism.
Hello from Paris!
We are getting ready for another trip—to Italy this time—and…
I AM NOT TAKING MY LAPTOP.
This means that after next Monday you will probably be getting photos for a little while instead of text. Lots of photos. With captions typed by my fat fingers shaking with symptoms of computer withdrawal. Though I am trying to finish up a couple more Brussels segments before my impressions there are displaced by new experiences, so you might get at least one or two more of those.
It’s going to be an adventure. Rome will be in the middle of a heatwave, in excess of 95 F (35 C) every day. But with Covid on the rise again in Europe, we can’t just duck into a cafe for something with ice cubes if we want to get cool. Instead, I’m combing through the guidebooks looking for handy cathedrals with chilly crypts that we can haunt when we need to.
I’m a little stressed out. Not just by fear of heat, but because many places lately require tickets bought online in advance, which means planning the whole trip beforehand, not just anticipating the next day or two. Which is weird for me. I like to sit at cafés, drop into the ordinary flow of the city like a stray leaf taken by the current and just bump into things, or find myself in a neighborhood and then check the guidebook to see what’s nearby.
I think my discomfort with planning has to do with desire, how I identify it, generate it, express it (or don’t). I remember being very curious when I was little—I think I already told the story about pressing so closely against a neighbor’s screen door as a tot that I tumbled right through the mesh.
Now, I mostly wonder what ordinary people eat for lunch, or what garbage turns up in the gutters—stubs of bread? Potatoes? Masks? How vendors at the food market interact with their regulars. I stand back and watch, my aloofness, I suspect, protection from the shame that could result if I threw myself forward like a three-year old attracted by human voices, wanting to sit on someone’s lap and inhale burnt coffee and stale cigarettes.
To be comfortable, I need an acceptable way in. Have to create a story in my mind about what a city is, or who it’s good for. Do I have a right to be there?
I didn’t feel at home right away in Paris. I had to learn something of its history, the people that moved through it. I learned that it was a river city like my own hometown Louisville, but also a city of artists, writers, and no good cranks.
They didn’t even have to be successful, like in New York. When I moved to Paris nobody asked, “What have you published?” “Where?” “For how much?” leaving me feeling like a fucking loser. Instead they asked, “What are you working on?” It made the effort itself honorable. I’d see the statue of a writer and feel nothing but camaraderie.
How can I enter Rome? As a coffee-drinker and pastry-eater? Should I be reading Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley? Or the letters of Pliny the Younger? You tell me.
In French News…
Sunday was the last round of the legislative elections here in France. The worst news is that the extreme right picked up a lot of seats. Though thankfully—from my point of view anyway—hard-left populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s electoral alliance did not get an absolute majority. In fact, they did not get a majority at all. So there’s no chance he’ll be prime minister.
But because Macron’s party lost their absolute majority, dropping over a hundred seats, Mélenchon’s sizable alliance can still bring the legislature to a standstill, like toddlers scream, No, no no! at everything that is proposed. Which means that if Macron wants to get anything done, he’ll have to do plenty of horse-trading, persuasion, and compromise—something he stinks at.
In Other News
Another really interesting newsletter by Caroline Criado Perez about male-default science—skip right to the part about what happens when you try to get medical researchers to include women in their studies because women are not just tiny men, and many things including cardiac systems are very different.
Male violence or the right side of history… is the latest from Suzanne Moore, furious at how in Britain male violence is increasingly accepted towards unacceptable women. “I am old and ugly enough to know male violence when I see it. So forget your slogans and your mantras or your inner spiritual gendered essence. I don’t have one as I am non-binary because I don’t accept that gender IS a binary. Anyway, as Tom Hanks didn’t say, my Mars is in its own house Aries, so back the fuck off.”
The oldie but goodie, “You Should Feel Bad” by Victoria Smith, about how “The shonky raunch feminism of the nineties and early noughties told young women they could own their own objectification. We were taught that the way out of the bind we found ourselves in was to tell ourselves we’d chosen it all along. What we have now is worse. We are told to own our own abuse, become our own abuser. If someone exposes themselves to us, we must lecture ourselves on how perverted we are to have noticed. If someone rapes us, we must remind ourselves never to report (carceral feminism!) and never to tell (weaponisation of trauma!). Whatever happens to us, we are always the privileged bitch who might, potentially, exploit it; in that sense, every assault is another trump card. Every time our stomach tightens or our breath shortens, every time a freeze or flight response sets in, we have yet more physical evidence of how awful we are. For fuck’s sake, Karen. Who’d want to rape you? Or, if you are raped, well, so what? They’re going to do it anyway. Stop clutching those pearls.”
Another older article about forgotten writer Gene Stratton-Porter and the Midwestern landscape she helped save. “Stratton-Porter published 26 books: novels, nature studies, poetry collections and children’s books. Only 55 books published between 1895 and 1945 sold upwards of one million copies. Gene Stratton-Porter wrote five of those books—far more than any other author of her time.”
That’s it for this time.
Disgruntledly yours,