Atwood…
Margaret Atwood: A Word After a Word After a Word is Power, is a new show on HULU. I watched it last night and liked it. If you’re locked in and looking for something interesting, check it out.
Archive for the ‘Writers’ Category
Okay, so…
We live in a completely patriarchal world. Everything we think, see, or even believe, is male. They run the show and…if you’re thinking...here she goes again…that’s exactly what patriarchy wants you to think. Women have been brainwashed into thinking that what they’ve been told is real, when it’s NOT. They have been taught to believe that what people like me say about THEM, makes me a bitch, or a nagging bitch, for even bringing this up…again.
When I write short stories where a woman stabs a man, I can assume that at least one, or two, women frowns upon it, or think that I’m bitter, a man hater, or any number of things, and that’s fine with me. I’ve been called a lot worse, believe me.
The thing is, women have been taught to protect men, to let them get away with beating, raping, and killing us, and even putting us in houses to work and raise kids, while they enjoy the world outside and have all the freedom they want. But hey…that’s what THEY want us to do, and they have made the world in such a way, that women believe that’s what we’re SUPPOSED to do too. It’s NOT. We get the jobs they don’t want. Remember that.
As for writers, take poet Charles Bukowski (he’s dead now). He’s vile and treats women like GARBAGE, things to be used and called disgusting names. He’s pretty much a moron. People read him. They love him, especially men. But what female poets write about men the same way? See, women aren’t SUPPOSED to do that to men. They aren’t ALLOWED to write that way. When they do, the punishment can be severe. Their career destroyed, name calling shows up immediately…man hater (which I love because no one calls male writers, women haters…EVER). And, critics will pretty much destroy women with words. Women cannot hate men the way men can freely hate women. It’s simply not allowed.
Men do the most horrendous things to women in real life, in books, in films, in VIDEO GAMES, pretty much everywhere they can, but women, are supposed to be NICE, or at least SHUT THE FUCK UP!
We really aren’t ALL nice. We’ve simply been silenced, written out of history, and pretty much ERASED. That might be okay with you, but it’s not okay with me.
Men are in control and they don’t want us to have any power at all. So, they make sure we don’t have it. You can tell because you can name the handful of women whose names you might recognize (most of them will be ancient). Even Mary Cassatt, the only female, American Impressionist, isn’t mentioned 99% of the time for even BEING THERE, let alone working the same way the MEN were. The MEN get all the credit and MUSUEM SPACE.
So, if I kill off a few men, now and then, I think it’s only fair. I don’t torture them, lock them in a room in a basement, beat them, chain them to anything, rape or cut them, I don’t do all the things men do to women, so I think I’m allowed to stab a guy who won’t let a woman have her tea in a cafe, at least once in awhile.
Women are just now learning about their own herstory. It’s sketchy because a lot of information was lost, or never written down. Plus women’s names have been lost, having taken the names of their husband. ERASED.
Here’s the thing. Women writers are locked into two positions. They can write stories that are acceptable to patriarchy, or they can write how they feel and be condemned as a shrew, and destroyed. See, that’s how men have us shut us up, with no way out. Fortunately, there are more options for women today, but it’s still difficult and most women won’t read what other women are writing, if it’s about serious issues, instead of novels, romance and otherwise. Women don’t want to know, or else they just don’t care. Maybe, they just don’t want to deal with the fact that their lives have been stolen from them and they didn’t even realize it. And, most women just won’t believe it. They also won’t believe that things could be, or should be, any different.
The overwhelming majority of men do not read books written by women. They don’t have to. Boys don’t want to read books they believe are written for girls. That’s because females don’t matter, don’t count, and are despised. Believe it or not, it’s still true. Girls and women read books written by men all the time. We should stop that. We should support women authors and see what happens to male authors, when WOMEN STOP READING THEM. Maybe that will wake them up a little, since more women than men actually read. I very rarely buy books written by men, unless they are about science, or a particular artist. I always buy books written by women. I wish I could get women to stop supporting men, so they could see what kind of power we actually have in the marketplace. But see, patriarchy has taught us that male is better, more intelligent, blah, blah, blah…but it’s NOT. Women are ALWAYS taught to support men, especially over other women. Gag!
Anyway, no one will care. They rarely do. Try getting a man in your life to read your favorite female author. Not a romance novel, or Pride and Prejudice, something violent and fast. Good luck.
Oh, and it’s not just female writers, it’s artists too. It’s in everything. Including how we dress, stand POSE, smile, talk and look.
So, that’s what I’ve been thinking about today. How about you?
Writer…Poem
when
a
writer
dies
all
of
her
unwritten
stories
die
with
her
on
earth
even
words
have
a
shelf
life
Sometimes…
Sometimes it’s difficult, often impossible, to understand what other people are writing about, when my experiences and outlooks are so dramatically different from those of other writers. I wonder where they’re from and how they came to be the way they are. There’s no way to share in what they are saying, there’s no door, or window to climb through, to touch base with their words. I don’t understand how they can believe that smiling, hoping and being nice will change the world on a grand scale. All I can do is accept what the authors have said as something that belongs to them alone and move on, knowing they would never be able to understand me either. Sometimes there is no common ground. None at all.
A Typer…
I’m more of a typer, than a writer. I identify as a writer, at least to myself, but truthfully, I often feel as if I have little to do with things I write. I sit down, have no idea what I’m going to say, and then there’s a chapter, or four, on my computer. I don’t plan anything, have absolutely no idea how anything is going to end, until I type the last sentence. It’s just the way I do things. No plan. Often, an idea, or word, pops into my head and I have to write something IMMEDIATELY, on anything close at hand because the words are in a hurry to be written. It’s urgent for them and they push me hard to get what they have to say down on a napkin, a receipt, or anything at all. It’s an exciting way for me to live. I’m not the kind of person who likes to plan. Outlines are like kryptonite. I refused to do them in school. I remember telling a teacher I couldn’t possibly make an outline because I didn’t know how things were going to turn out. Schools don’t have room for people like that. Planning doesn’t fit into my life…there’s no place for it. I’m a typer and the words tell me what to type. They keep me in suspense until the end and it’s like reading a story right from the beginning…all the way through to where I say, “Oh, that’s where this was going!” Sometimes I think I write just to find out what all the endings are.
Today…
Today was 43 degrees (YAY!) and partly sunny (partly sunny can simply mean that we HOPE the sun comes out for a minute or two). Walked a couple miles outside, after I came home from playing…so here’s the scoop.
I was sitting by the window in the Corner Bakery, waiting for my Pasta to be delivered, or served, either one. There were a lot of people around but it wasn’t actually crowded. Couples were in abundance, one or two single women, myself included, and two or three men in suits. It’s a nice place and friends were chatting and men and women were eating and reading. The wait staff is always nice and the food is pretty good. I’ll get to the Brownie Bites later.
After my late lunch I went to the store to get fruit cups, the little ones you put into lunch boxes hoping your kids will eat them and not just throw them away, or trade them for candy. Bling got me hooked on portion control, using little cups of things and it really works, unless you eat all of the cups at once, but who would ever do that??? Right? We both love pudding cups and fruit cups. I’m kind of afraid to find out if there are any other things that come in cups, or I’ll start eating those too and then I won’t buy any real food at all. Bling keeps the little cups in her desk because like Maraschino Cherries, they have a half life of ten billion years, even if you bury them in the dirt.
Okay, I know I’ve written about Brownie Bites before. They are my Kryptonite, well one of them anyway. They come in bags and I cannot resist their many charms, one of those charms being powdered sugar. I thought I would be clever and just get a brownie, because that’s portion control, right? I mean there are more bites in the bag than there are in a brownie. But the brownie wasn’t nearly as fresh or delicious as the bites always are. I know that because I ate the brownie while I was pushing my cart up and down the aisle of the grocery store, looking for fruit cups, so that I could eat “healthy.” I have also come to the conclusion that if I eat a cupcake, like the one I had yesterday from the Cheesecake Factory, every morning, I won’t have to eat anything else all day because the cupcake weights about five pounds and is very satisfying and filling. If I ever tire of eating said cupcakes, say in ten or eleven years, I can switch to Brownie Bites in the bag. Life is easy, once you take the time to do the math.
So, it was a beautiful day today and that’s saying something, believe me. Our weather is so terrible that my grandson said he is moving away as soon as he can. My granddaughter us going to move to CA and my other grandson will probably be moving to GA very soon. They have really big bugs in Georgia, I’ve been there…I’ve seen them. Chicago bugs are tiny because it’s almost impossible to survive here, even for insects. The kids want to get as far away from here as possible. That’s how bad our weather is and this is a truly stellar year. It’s the constant darkness and the SAD that gets to us. We all have it and it’s very depressing. It’s possible we will all be moving but I can’t imagine where we will go…although depending on the next presidential election we may need to look for a place to live in a different country.
Anyway, a storm is supposedly heading our way, maybe…sometime tomorrow. Depending on where our houses are located we can get anywhere from 0 to 7 inches of snow, unless the storm misses us. A slow news day, I suppose. When I was out walking I saw a wee pile of snow. It wasn’t that dirty but it did look lonely. It was just siting there on the muddy grass, by the curb, looking drippy and lost. I felt sorry for it. Poor thing, shrinking little by little. Snow can sometimes have a short life span, but this poor thing has been trying to disappear for weeks and weeks. Curb snow is like that…it’s forced to hang on to the bitter end. If the storm the weatherperson was shouting about, between segments of Lucifer, last night actually hits us, it will probably be heart attack snow, which means heavy and wet. Good for packin’ as well as killing people. It’s supposed to rain first so that means wet snow. The last snow that landed was fluffy and nice. Couldn’t make snowballs out of it but it was happy snow, as opposed to the other kind, the evil snow:) All depends on if you want snowballs and death, or no snowballs and life. It was a lot easier to make that decision when I was ten.
Rethinking Life 
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