Resolving to deal better with deadlines. It isn't enough to have an outline a month ahead and then write up something a week beforehand. (I was feeling proud of this as evidence I was being responsible but it's not enough.) I need to have feedback cycles and smaller deadlines... and schedule out plans for every little piece of a project. Get feedback on them, allow for re-writing. It's not like I've never heard this advice before, but it's hitting home that I've got to make it part of my process.
I realized yesterday as I was writing up my grant proposal that I needed rec letters. Damn! So I had a choice that I almost took - of not applying at all and just starting to work on the Jan. 17th deadline. Then I felt too cowardly doing that, and too upset with myself, and figured I'd try it anyway. Wrote to F, F.F. and DJ for letters and they all said yes. I feel awful and know that it further makes me look bad and unprofessional to F. And that my essay could have been way better and the only way to get it to be way better would be... getting feedback, which it's now really too late for.
In theory all the grad school was supposed to train me to spout that application stuff well enough --- but the truth is I need editing and revision. That kind of writing doesn't come very easily to me. The poetry and translation itself does, but I feel so inadequate when I have to talk academic-speak... I have not really found a comfortable voice in that context.
I worked on it a little bit more today but (as when I write papers) mostly I was still overloaded on it and unable to assess it well.
Hung out with Jam, went to SF, bookstores, cafe, pizza with Jam and Caraja. I enraged myself by reading about halfway through "Self-Made Man" by Norah Vincent. I loved the early chapters a lot - very curious about masculinity and male bonding and friendship, and the experience of passing. That was all pretty good though I was creeped out at the fetishizing of working class men, and at the way that lying in personal relationships was so crucial... Why not go hang with men of her own social class? But then at later chapters it was like unrelenting, incredibly horrible misogyny - that was my reaction to it - The stuff she says about strippers is just over the top. Cruel, dehumanizing... amazing. I was disgusted with her disgust and her cruelty. Vincent describes (and uses) strippers and sex workers as dead-souled, revolting, hostile zombies — she actually calls them “not real women” — while being a giant apologist for men. The dating chapters were also pretty horrifying. You know... With a book like this, if it actually said anything that obnoxious about men, no one would be buying it and reviewing it positively etc. But saying all that shit about women seems to be JUST FINE, in fact more than fine. It is rewarded. That's fucked up. I enjoyed the chapter about the monks, though again, the ethics of it all suck. Norah/Ned seems to creepily get off on the moment when she tells her friends or dates "I'm a woman." Of course the interesting bit is her analysis of the undercurrents of how she /he is treated by the other person & how though nothing else changed other than their perception of her gender, they suddenly can talk to her about different subjects or with different degrees of intimacy or warmth or can give her a big hug or whatever. All that is interesting... However, spare me the vitriol against strippers and the apologist bullshit for racist and sexist men... she spends a fair amount of time making excuses for the men's sexist remarks and jokes and their remarks on race, while when women are suspicious of men Ned judges them quite harshly - seeing them as being powerful, damaged, terrible, fearsome, rude, tedious people. While at the beginning of the book she notes the power of getting to be not stared at - to be invisible to other men, unnoticed, not facing the hostility and objectification - and that that was powerful - she seems to forget it as she slides into experiencing male privilege. This made me feel really grossed out about my own experience the other day, which I enjoyed and was perturbed by in equal measure.
I leave you with this quote from p. 127 of the paperback edition - which made me laugh out loud at the word "momentary" and then shriek with outrage at the end of the paragraph:
Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which, I supose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no."
Oh by all means ... women are like supervillains ... especially when they say "no".
WTF!
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