was like that, but she had something else, too, and it was that “something else” quality that made what she did so peculiarly aggravating.
Before I go any further, it must be said that I arrived at the festival tense and already prone to aggravation. I have been divorced for five years. I am the mother of a ten-year-old girl. My ex-husband is stalwart in his child-support payments, but he is a housepainter who is trying to be an artist, and out of respect for his dreams, his payments are not large. We met in graduate school, where I was studying creative writing, a dream-cum-memory rolling monotonously near the bottom of the subthought ocean. After years of writing in-brief book reviews, plus fact-checking and proofreading for an online magazine, I have recently begun writing full-length reviews (which means a little more money and a lot less time for playing “The Mighty Michelle” with Kira); for the first time, I have been assigned to do something light and funny on the social scene at the literary festival. The idea of proximity to so many actual authors may ve caused some more intense than usual subthought rolling, which is perhaps why a fight with my daughter got nastier than it had to this morning. It did not help that it was a fight about whether or not she can, at ten, bleach her hair “like Gwen Stefani,” and that the fight then had to turn into a discussion with Tom about how he had to be sure that while staying with him this afternoon, she did not somehow get hold of boxed bleach and take charge of the bathroom. Or, furthermore, that she not be allowed to persuade him that red might be okay if blond was not.
Still, for the most part, I was able to clear my mind of all this once I arrived at the festival. Writers from all over the world were there, people from Somalia, Greece, Israel, the United States, Italy, and Britain. There were writers who’d been forced to flee their countries, writers from police states, writers from places where everybody was starving; writers who wrote about the daily prob' lems of ordinary people, the obscenity of politics and the pain of the lower classes, glamorous writers who wrote about the exciting torment of the fashionable classes. Writers with airs of gravity or triviality, well-heeled or wearing suits they had probably rented for this event, standing at the bar with an air of hard-won triumph, or simply looking with childish delight at all the glowing bottles of delicious drinks and trays of foodstuffs. I glimpsed a smart blond woman on the arm of a popular author and fleetingly thought of my daughter: If she could see me here, she would feel curiosity and admiration.
But getting back to the “feminist author”; it is not really right to call her that, as she was not the only feminist there, as, in fact, her presence may have annoyed other, more serious feminists. She was a feminist who had apparently been a prostitute at some point in her colorful youth, and who had gone on record describing prostitutes as fighters against the patriarchy. She would say stupid things like that, but then she would write some good sentences that
would make people say, “Wow, she’s kind of intelligent!” Some people may’ve said she should not have been at the festival at all, but why not? An event such as this is dazzling partly in its variety; it is a social blaze of litde heads rolling by in a ball of light, and all the heads have something to say: “No one should ever write about the Holocaust again!” “Irony is ruining our culture!” Or in the case of the feminist ex-prostitute, “Women can enjoy sexual violence, too!” Well. I had been asked to write something funny, and the feminist author sounded pretty funny. I pictured her in a short skirt and big high heels, standing up on the balls of her feet with her legs bowed like a samurai, her fists and her arms flexed combatively, head cocked like she was on the lookout for some patriarchy to mount. An image you could
Before I go any further, it must be said that I arrived at the festival tense and already prone to aggravation. I have been divorced for five years. I am the mother of a ten-year-old girl. My ex-husband is stalwart in his child-support payments, but he is a housepainter who is trying to be an artist, and out of respect for his dreams, his payments are not large. We met in graduate school, where I was studying creative writing, a dream-cum-memory rolling monotonously near the bottom of the subthought ocean. After years of writing in-brief book reviews, plus fact-checking and proofreading for an online magazine, I have recently begun writing full-length reviews (which means a little more money and a lot less time for playing “The Mighty Michelle” with Kira); for the first time, I have been assigned to do something light and funny on the social scene at the literary festival. The idea of proximity to so many actual authors may ve caused some more intense than usual subthought rolling, which is perhaps why a fight with my daughter got nastier than it had to this morning. It did not help that it was a fight about whether or not she can, at ten, bleach her hair “like Gwen Stefani,” and that the fight then had to turn into a discussion with Tom about how he had to be sure that while staying with him this afternoon, she did not somehow get hold of boxed bleach and take charge of the bathroom. Or, furthermore, that she not be allowed to persuade him that red might be okay if blond was not.
Still, for the most part, I was able to clear my mind of all this once I arrived at the festival. Writers from all over the world were there, people from Somalia, Greece, Israel, the United States, Italy, and Britain. There were writers who’d been forced to flee their countries, writers from police states, writers from places where everybody was starving; writers who wrote about the daily prob' lems of ordinary people, the obscenity of politics and the pain of the lower classes, glamorous writers who wrote about the exciting torment of the fashionable classes. Writers with airs of gravity or triviality, well-heeled or wearing suits they had probably rented for this event, standing at the bar with an air of hard-won triumph, or simply looking with childish delight at all the glowing bottles of delicious drinks and trays of foodstuffs. I glimpsed a smart blond woman on the arm of a popular author and fleetingly thought of my daughter: If she could see me here, she would feel curiosity and admiration.
But getting back to the “feminist author”; it is not really right to call her that, as she was not the only feminist there, as, in fact, her presence may have annoyed other, more serious feminists. She was a feminist who had apparently been a prostitute at some point in her colorful youth, and who had gone on record describing prostitutes as fighters against the patriarchy. She would say stupid things like that, but then she would write some good sentences that
would make people say, “Wow, she’s kind of intelligent!” Some people may’ve said she should not have been at the festival at all, but why not? An event such as this is dazzling partly in its variety; it is a social blaze of litde heads rolling by in a ball of light, and all the heads have something to say: “No one should ever write about the Holocaust again!” “Irony is ruining our culture!” Or in the case of the feminist ex-prostitute, “Women can enjoy sexual violence, too!” Well. I had been asked to write something funny, and the feminist author sounded pretty funny. I pictured her in a short skirt and big high heels, standing up on the balls of her feet with her legs bowed like a samurai, her fists and her arms flexed combatively, head cocked like she was on the lookout for some patriarchy to mount. An image you could
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