And yet... complicitity.

Desde pelo menos o ano passado, tenho andado a pensar nisto. A objectificação entra sempre à força na vida das mulheres, pois é de violência, e sobretudo de mulheres, que se trata. Violência disfarçada de amizade, dever, favor..., violência indisfarçada: desafio, provocação, desrespeito. Redunda sempre em repulsa, e como quase sempre acontece às mulheres, uma repulsa que não tem nunca um sentido único, que das questões de agenciamento e empoderamento o eu, claramente, nunca pode excluir-se. Não sei de quanto tempo precisamos, não faço a mais pequena ideia como mudar o olhar, mas Anne Valente pretende contribuir para isso, e só o ensejo é de valor. 

My first-ever semester of teaching a college fiction workshop eight years ago, a male student wrote a short story where a male protagonist brutalized women for pages, for the sake of brutalization. In workshop discussion, I raised my question carefully: What work can violence do in fiction? And if it’s not doing necessary work, when does violence become sensationalism? I did not use the word gaze but the student watched me regardless. After class, when every other student had filtered out of the room, he walked to the front of the class while I was erasing the board and said as close as he could to my face, I want you to know that wasn’t just a story. I want you to know that I hate women. My breath stopped but I finished erasing the board and moved to leave the classroom as quickly as possible but he beat me to it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go walk the dog. He smirked. Do you even know what that means? He meant masturbation. He meant humiliation. And he meant fear, both mine and his, that I had challenged his work and that I’d tried to teach him anything at all. That I had stepped outside of his narrative of me, that for a moment I had transcended the camera’s scope. 

Three years ago my husband was a groomsman in the wedding of a friend we’d both known since college. This friend was more my husband’s friend, and at various points had quibbled with the facts in my short stories, had suggested that his PhD in mathematics would gain him more job offers than mine in creative writing ever could, had once cornered me in a bar to tell me in explicit detail how he’d cheated on his girlfriend, and had told my husband when he was still my college boyfriend that he should fuck other women while I was abroad for six months. Nonetheless, my husband and I drove nine hours from Ohio to North Carolina for his wedding. During the reception, as he was making the rounds from table to table and my husband was in the restroom, he leaned down and whispered in my ear, You may think your last name is Valente but this is my wedding so tonight you're just Mrs. Finnell to me. My husband’s last name, what I hadn’t taken four years before when we got married. You may think. This is my wedding. You’re just. To me. The face-slap of this whisper at a wedding, people clinking silverware and toasting all around us. Celluloid. A shot out of focus. I was breathless with anger but I smiled because it was his wedding and even still my anger couldn’t keep me from being sized down to the fact of my body in a cocktail dress, from being shoved back into a camera’s lens, from being every object he intended me to be. 

And yet I am complicit. I grew up on film, which is to say, I grew up acculturated to viewing the world as object, my sense of myself and the world around me sieved through a director’s lens. I knew myself as subject, another kind of spectator beyond the male perspective I was meant comply with, but I also absorbed the inclination to view myself through a haze of projection. We learn to hate ourselves for what is objectified and punished, for what the dominant gaze tells us doesn’t belong. We learn to disavow what hurts. Three weeks after this wedding, I still invited this asshole to my first book’s launch party where he asked from the back of the room during the Q&A to explain the use of the word mathematics in my chapbook’s title, a chapbook that had already come out the year before and that I hadn’t even read from, and what could possibly be elegiac about a system of integers and objects.   

A little voice inside me: Should I delete the word asshole? Am I only making someone who has objectified me an object in turn? Is this complicity—no better? Or is the complicity the little voice itself, the voice of disavowal, the internalized self-hatred that says I was born to be nice, that I shouldn’t push beyond the allotment of my flattened screen?

O texto de Anne Valente na íntegra, aqui.

Dia de São Nicolau

To learn how to walk is to walk

In Democracy for Realists, for instance, the authors criticise what they call the ‘folk theory’ of democracy. This maintains that elected representatives should translate their constituents’ preferences into public policy. The problem, according to these political scientists, is that most voters lack the time, energy or ability to immerse themselves in the technicalities of public policy. Instead, people tend to vote based on group identification, or an impulse to align with one political faction rather than another.

In a memorable chapter of their book, Achen and Bartels show that politicians often suffer electoral defeat for events beyond their control. In the summer of 1916, for example, New Jersey’s beachgoers experienced a series of shark attacks. In that November’s election, the beach towns gave President Woodrow Wilson fewer votes than New Jersey’s non-beach towns. The voters, it seems, were punishing Wilson for the shark attacks. According to Achen and Bartels, voters’ ability ‘to make sensible judgments regarding credit and blame is highly circumscribed’. This is a polite way of saying that most voters are not smart enough to realise that presidents are not responsible for shark attacks. (...)

The remedy for our democracy deficit is to devolve as much power as possible to the local level. Many problems can be addressed only on the state, federal and international level, but the idea is that participating in local politics teaches citizens how to speak in public, negotiate with others, research policy issues, and learn about their community and the larger circles in which it is embedded. Like any other skill, the way to become a better citizen is to practise citizenship.

Nicholas Tampio, Treat people as citizens.

Monday mood (9)

Sufjan Stevens, finalista do liceu em 1993, como nós longe de conceber a existência da maldade humana.

Ainda de ontem - 29

Slim darling, you came along and into my arms and into my heart and all the real true love I have is yours – and now I’m afraid you won’t understand and that you’ll become impatient and that I’ll lose you – but even if that happened, I wouldn’t stop loving you for you are my last love and all the rest of my life I shall love you and watch you and be ready to help you should you ever need help. 

All the nice things I do each day would be so much sweeter and so much gayer if you were with me. I find myself saying a hundred times a day, ‘If Slim could only see that’ or ‘I wish Slim could hear this.’ I want to make a new life with you – I want all the friends I’ve lost to meet you and know you and love you as I do – and live again with you, for the past years have been terribly tough, damn near drove me crazy. You’ll soon be here, Baby, and when you come you’ll bring everything that’s important to me in this world with you. 

 — Humphrey Bogart para Lauren Bacall.

Para a reconstrução do mundo

Stern1985 Botanical Latin by andresorejuela

Da actualidade

Noutros Lugares

Não é que ser possível ser feliz acabe,
quando se aprende a sê-lo com bem pouco.
Ou que não mais saibamos repetir o gesto
que mais prazer nos dá, ou que daria
a outrem um prazer irresistível. Não:
o tempo nos afina e nos apura:
faríamos o gesto com infinda ciência.
Não é que passem as pessoas, quando
o nosso pouco é feito da passagem delas.
Nem é também que ao jovem seja dado
o que a mais velhos se recusa. Não.

É que os lugares acabam. Ou ainda antes
de serem destruídos, as pessoas somem,
e não mais voltam onde parecia
que elas ou outras voltariam sempre
por toda a eternidade. Mas não voltam,
desviadas por razões ou por razão nenhuma.

É que as maneiras, modos, circunstâncias
mudam. Desertas ficam praias que brilhavam
não de água ou sol mas de solta juventude.
As ruas rasgam casas onde leitos
já frios e lavados não rangiam mais.
E portas encostadas só se abrem sobre
a treva que nenhuma sombra aquece.

O modo como tínhamos ou víamos,
em que com tempo o gesto sempre o mesmo
faríamos com ciência refinada e sábia
(o mesmo gesto que seria útil,
se o modo e a circunstância persistissem),
tornou-se sem sentido e sem lugar.

Os outros passam, tocam-se, separam-se,
exatamente como dantes. Mas
aonde e como? Aonde e como? Quando?
Em que praias, que ruas, casas, e quais leitos,
a que horas do dia ou da noite, não sei.
Apenas sei que as circunstâncias mudam
e que os lugares acabam. E que a gente
não volta ou não repete, e sem razão, o que
só por acaso era a razão dos outros.

Se do que vi ou tive uma saudade sinto,
feita de raiva e do vazio gélido,
não é saudade, não. Mas muito apenas
o horror de não saber como se sabe agora
o mesmo que aprendi. E a solidão
de tudo ser igual doutra maneira.
E o medo de que a vida seja isto:
um hábito quebrado que se não reata,
senão noutros lugares que não conheço.

Jorge de Sena (1967)

Diz que é a própria da Artémis

Guillaume Seignac, Diana hunting, 1899

Por entre boninas - 4

Sottsass Jr. Ettore, Val di Fassa, 1976.

De outras Joanas - 13

Nadav Kander, Joanna Kavenna, Best of the Young British Novelists photo shoot