heehee

This is Phallus Week in my gender class, and I found this lovely little tidbit in one of my books, The Male Body by Susan Bordo.
"The penis, far from being an impenetrable knight in armor, in fact wears its heart on its sleeve."
She also notes earlier that Pat Califia (a lesbian theorist) suggests that men experience "dildo envy" more than women experience penis envy. I like taking classes where I get to read things like this.

haymarket

Well, tomorrow is May Day, but I don't think I'm going to be going to any of the rallies or anything. However, I did finally figure out where Haymarket Square is, at least I think, and I'm going to be downtown Wednesday for some stuff so I think I might try to go just visit it if I have time, just look around and think a little bit. I wish I was a bit more motivated to go tomorrow, but I'm really bad about attending things by myself and I just have lots of crap to do, as always. I don't know what all's going on anyway, except for a rally I think opposing this statue that everybody really dislikes, and an anrchist's picnic at some point.
In other news, I saw a nice drag show last night. They do a show at the end of every month that's amatures and legitimate Chicago Kings alternating, and this was the first one since I've been here. Very nice, I was a lot closer than normal and had a really good time. Next month Anna will be here, and it's a fetish theme, which will probably be pretty cool and interesting. I need to go shopping, though, for appropiate clothing ;-)

whoa

I went to a talk on pornography tonight, specifically queer pornography and sex work and feminism. The first speaker talked about more mainstream representations of sex work and about the changing thoughts of feminism about sex work, fairly straightforward stuff but interesting. The second woman, a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, used to film queer porn for a now-defunct website. She brought a slideshow of about 170 stills from movies she had filmed that played constantly while she talked. Every once in a while, she'd glance up and say something like, "Oh, this is kind of a mother-and-child representation" or whatever. She talked about how she felt that a lot of the difference between queer porn and straight porn was just the bodies portrayed, the range of available bodies that you chould show. She also said that on their website, queer viewers liked porn that showed a heteronormative situation much more than one that didn't, which I found pretty interesting. Her talk culminated in us all watching about 15 or 20 minutes of porn videos. It was so weird, to be watching these really really hardcore videos of transgendered porn and d/s porn and just stuff I've never come close to seeing before, in a classroom full of people. People were covering their eyes, or just looking somewhat stunned, or really uncomfortable. It is pretty hard to watch porn in a large, self-conscious group. I wish I had been able to focus more on what she was saying, but porn is super distracting from spoken text, I have to say.

yay for the earth!

Happy Earth Day! Unfortunately it was windy and cold and rainy and generally nasty here today, so I didn't really feel like going out and experiencing nature or whatever. But if it ever gets nice again and I figure out where the woods are, I certainly will.

wasting time

This is what I'm doing instead of homework.

Spring
by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
a black bear
has just risen from sleep
and is staring

down the mountain.
All night
in the brisk and shallow restlessness
of early spring

I think of her,
her four black fists
flicking the gravel,
her tongue

like a red fire
touching the grass,
the cold water.
There is only one question:

how to love this world.
I think of her
rising
like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
the silence
of the trees.
Whatever else

my life is
with its poems
and its music
and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
coming
down the mountain,
breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her--
her white teeth,
her wordlessness,
her perfect love.

today awakens inside my cup

I did another master's student a favor this week by playing a concert for her, and in return she gave me this nifty bamboo box with a bunch of different types of tea in it. The tea is good, but the descriptions of how to brew it are hilarious and overdone. For example:

For the Perfect Cup:
In the brilliant light of sunrise, bring the freshest of waters to a boil. Breathe in the new day as you pour over a bag of Morning Rise and, like full leaf tea, steep 3-5 minutes, to desired strength. Like most teas, over brewing brings out bitterness from tannin, a natural part of tea. Enjoy!

Grrrr x 6

I mysteriously lost a whole cd case when I was in Tucson over break, and ugh, I just tallied what I can remember was in it. Damn, a lot of good stuff, or at least stuff that I liked for whatever reason, was in there, and I have the nagging feeling I'm forgetting some things I really will miss. If anybody has any of this, let me know and I'll send you blank cds or whatever. (Some of it I hopefully have covered, most of it in fact. Things in bold italics I don't. This is partially just a mournful memorial for all my poor lost cds. Although maybe somebody's life will change for having found all of these. Music is weird like that.) I'm really saddened by this.

• Bitch and Animal, What's that Smell?
• Indigo Girls, Rites of Passage
• Jewel, various mix and bootleg cds
• Sleater-Kinney, The Hot Rock, Call the Doctor, All Hands on the Bad One
• Le Tigre, Feminist Sweepstakes
• Dave Matthews Band, Before these Crowded Streets
• Joni Mitchell, Blue
• Julie Ruin
• Ani: Knuckle Down, Not So Soft, Puddle Dive, Not a Pretty Girl, Living in Clip disc 1, Revelling/Reckoning, and Evolve (damn, that hurt)
• a few other mix-type things