the kairotic moment, or, the preface to the preface

i've been teaching my students about "the kairotic moment"  (and based on the quizzes i just graded, almost half didn't get it. my bad.) this is the moment of kairos--something like the opportune moment-- that a person senses is the right time to act.

as i said in yesterday's post, reading the judith dusku interview was my kairotic moment.  i was compelled to act on something i had thought about doing for a while, but hadn't yet found the courage or the right moment to speak.

i'm slow to act, usually.

this is the quote that compelled, or maybe propelled, me to act:  "as a feminist, i'm telling other people:  don't be afraid to tell your story."  so i started, just barely, to tell mine.  though i left out a lot of the why's and wheretofore's in yesterday's post.  & my kairotic moment came at bad time, practically speaking, when i had such a small window of writing time that i had to keep it brief.

(maybe that was lucky for you!)

the other thing i've been doing at school lately is reading wordsworth's "preface to the lyrical ballads" as well as his "essay supplementary to the preface to the lyrical ballads."  dear wordsworth.  i can so well understand his desire and frustration!  to be heard! to be loved! to be popular!  to be understood! to continue prefacing and supplementing! so many explanations of his poems, and why they are great, and should live forever in our hearts!

and can't we all understand dear wordsworth, at least a little?

so here is my preface.  in response to some questions and thoughts from readers on my mitt romney post.

& if necessary,

maybe another day,

an essay supplementary as well.

1) do i speak for mormons or for myself?  for myself.  i was careful to use the pronouns "my" and "i" when making a claim of belief.

2) do i believe that what i said was merely my own subjective interpretation of mormon scripture and teachings?  yes and no.  i recognize that my stances are not mainstream within the mormon church, but i also know that i am not alone in believing many of the statements i made on my blog yesterday.  i also believe, as text interpretation is what i am trained to do, and what i spend most of my work life doing, i have strong textual evidence from all of the bodies of mormon scripture as well as teachings from the mormon temple for the beliefs i espouse.  this is where i have taken my understandings from. perhaps another day we can talk specifics.

3) am i judging romney for being a bad mormon?  i am not judging romney, or anyone, for being a bad mormon.  by anyone's standard, i myself am probably a "bad" mormon.  by the standards i set out in the "my kind of mormon" statements, i am not even my own "my kind of mormon."  my ideals are high.  mormon ideals are high, and exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to fully live up to (a whole other post!)

i think one thing almost all mormons feel right now is the excitement about getting to "set the record straight".  (dear mormons!  we want so desperately to set the record straight!   to be loved!  to be popular!  to be successful!)  so i'm only adding my own version of "setting the record straight." i just want to put it out there, to add my voice to a few others, that not all mormons are super thrilled with capitalism, trickle down economics, anti-feminist rhetoric, rhetoric that maligns or blames the poor for their circumstances, or public policy that does not put the well-being of the weakest and meekest of society first and foremost.

i know the economic theories that explain why capitalism, trickle-down economics, and laissez-faire policies are ultimately, some day, better for poor people (yes, i took honors american heritage at byu with noel reynolds!) i don't believe these theories, though i have studied them fairly extensively (thank you, noel reynolds!), and i have never seen evidence that convinces me of their validity.  i know there are sincere believers who think the poor are better off under this type of regime.  i don't judge these sincere believers.  many of them are my mormon brothers and sisters, my family members, and people i know to be of good heart and sincere intent.  i don't hate these people or think they are immoral, or bad mormons.  i simply think they are wrong.

4) speaking of feminists, why do i think that feminism has a place in mormonism, and why do i think mormon women, in particular, need a stronger voice in the lds church? this is a bit of a roundabout answer.  it starts with an idea that i learned from political scientist valerie hudson, that when women are not at the table, the entire world suffers drastically.  hudson is a professor at texas a&m,  and was recently one of people magazine's 100 most influential people.  she is moderate, even maybe a little conservative, politically.  she is a mormon, a mother, a feminist, and a was a byu professor for 24 years, and she has gathered a large amount of empirical data backing up her premise that the amount of freedom, education, liberty, and power women have in a society are proportional to the well-being of that society in terms of economics, national security, health, etc.

i do not know how far hudson would take this premise in first world scenarios (much of her work is in the third world), but i do know, in a presentation i attended with her on this very topic, that she feels strongly that women's voices are needed at the highest levels of decision making in the most powerful institutions in the world.

what does this have to do with mormonism and romney?  in terms of mormonism, i belive, like dushku, that mormonism can be a powerful force for good in the world.  how much more powerful if women were encouraged greater and more equal participation in the organization?  i'm pretty confident that we're going to find that out in my lifetime.  in terms of romney, i believe he has discouraged women from full participation, perhaps unwittingly, as a pastoral figure in the church, and politically, he does not espouse progressive policies for american women.  this has been damaging to the mormon church and will, i believe, also be damaging to the american public if he is elected.

again, i know mormon women who feel strongly that mothers should be mostly at home when they have small children.  i don't think these women are dumb, wrong, or doing unimportant work, but i do hope that all women will expand their voices to wider spheres, whether or not they have children.  this will be good for all of us.

5) do i believe that a presidential candidate's religion is relevant? i do not.  i know many people from various faith traditions, and from humanistic and aetheistic traditions, who share my vision of a moral society.  i believe that only the morality and efficacy of the policies a president will enact are relevant, and that's how i decide who to vote for.  i bring up mitt's mormonism more as a comment on how i arrived at my particular vision of a moral society than as a condemnation of the way he practices mormonism.  that is not relevant to my voting choice.

but, since mormonism was so central to the development of my values, i think it's interesting that two people who grew up listening to the same sermons, reading the same scriptures, going to services each and every week, raising families in a traditional nuclear family structure, and engaging in so many of the same cultural, social and religious activities could arrive at such radically different positions politically, could have such polarized world views.

i think that i was trying to explore this curiosity in my post, though that was not my explicitly stated purpose.  and again, to distance myself from a version of mormonism that i find distasteful and not representative of my beliefs.

thanks for your comments and feedback, readers, and thanks for listening to my long-winded explanations.  i hope i've done the job this time, and won't have to start in on my "essay supplementary".

a faint cri de couer

i think that, buried somewhere in the ridiculous number of posts i've written this year, is something about the viral article from the atlantic from anne marie slaughter, but i don't feel i've yet articulated what has bothered me about the fervent discussion of slaughter's piece, so here it goes again.

today i read a response to this article that moved me, that was salient in so many ways, but that i also feel compelled to rebuke just a little bit.

marie myung-ok lee, a writer and professor at columbia university (not exactly a slouch) talks about the limitations she lives with because of her severely disabled son.  here is one of my two favorite parts of her article (the other part is when she talks about how incredibly adequate her '69 hotpoint stove is for cooking three meals a day, despite her realtor's insistence that no one would cook on that stove.  i really hate renovation fever more than almost any of the other insane white middle-class trends of the 2000's):

When I look at friends and acquaintances, many with perfectly beautiful children and wonderful lives, and see how desperately unhappy or stressed they are about balancing work and family, I think to myself that the solution to many problems is deceptively obvious. We are chasing the wrong things, asking ourselves the wrong questions. It is not, "Can we have it all?" -- with "all" being some kind of undefined marker that shall forever be moved upwards out of reach just a little bit with each new blessing. We should ask instead, "Do we have enough?"

i completely agree with her on this.  .  

what should we be asking?  

how do we know when we have enough, or, how can we re-train our collectively disordered thinking to appreciate our blessings rather than despairing out lacks?  

i don't know.  i suck at that, especially today.

but, 

i can't leave without also speaking in defense of slaughter, whose work has been mischaracterized too often, in my mind.

so many responders, including myung-ok lee, seem to think that slaughter mostly cares about the individual woman's ability to fulfill her personal potential and live a life she feels deeply satisfied with.  certainly individual liberty is very important. but

i think slaughter makes a much broader, more encompassing, and more important point:

when we don't have women in the highest echelons of power, all women of all classes suffer.  and so do all men.  and so do all children.  and trees.  and animals.  

without the female perspective in the halls of power, something crucial is missing.  and, if i may be permitted to generalize, one of the things women seem to bring to the boardroom table is bigger, more communal or collective thinking.  thinking that takes into account the needs of the whole as much as if not more so than the needs of individual parts. there seems to be a world crisis looming, if not already here, because we have not been working holistically enough as a human family.

check out the work of valerie hudson for data that convincingly bears up this assertion.

i just wanted to say, and this is today's cri de couer, that getting sisters up there is more than a matter of individual fulfillment. it's necessary for community survival.

it's late, and i've had a rocky day.  a rocky couple of months, really, so 

hope i made any sense, 

or said something meaningful today. 

ms. behaving--ode to guerrilla grrls

who are they?  only the raddest ladies around.

super-heroines the guerrilla girls have been around for 25 years.  they have presented the facts, like vida and woman stats, that no one wanted to believe:  namely,  the fact that female artists and artists of color are facing gross discrimination.  


still.

it's 25 years later.  and maybe some stuff has gotten better.  like the fact that there's a major retrospective at the moma by a female artist.  (see julie's post about the cindy sherman show and some other female artists at the moma.)  but there's still a long way to go.  i've posted a portion of a speech from the chicago art institute's 2010 commencement, delivered by an anonymous artist in a gorilla mask.  some of the problems that still exist are outlined below.

guerrilla girls are so good at making the tight place of women in the art world (and their movement has had implications for women writers, filmmakers, etc.) into a totally rad place.  i'm inspired by some of their ideas for taking little daily actions (see ideas below)  to raise awareness, as they say with "facts, humor, and a little fake fur."

let me quickly point out my favorite of their bigger ideas:  make cheaper art, make art that is more inclusive, collaborative, and less about winners and losers.  i think this is the thing women need to bring to the table in art, culture, politics, religion, business, etc.  collaboration and inclusion. 

i hate the notion that we need competition to make the world better, and that it's just human nature to have rich and poor, powerful and weak, success and failure.  it's probably partly because of my religious upbringing, but on this point, you won't move me. 

we can have a more just, inclusive world with less killing, sickness, hunger, violence, rape, and oppression.  and as an artist, that's where i'll start with my little idealistic manifesto.

so go to the g.g. website.  buy some posters and bumperstickers and books.  or make your own.  spread the facts, make are support artists in collaboration & your on your way to utopia.

xo

amen

The Guerrilla Girls’ Guide to Behaving Badly (Which You Have to Do Most
of the Time in the World as We Know It)

Be a loser. The world of art and design doesn’t have to be an Olympics where a
few win and everyone else is forgotten. Even though the art market and celebrity
culture is set up to support the idea of hyper-competition and to make everyone
but the stars feel like failures, there’s also a world out there of artistic cooperation
and collaboration that’s not about raging egos. That’s the one we joined, and the
one you can join, too. Get beyond the outdated assumption that only a handful of
you will "make it." Don’t all waste your time running after the same few carrots.
Be impatient. Don't wait for a stamp of approval from the system. Don’t wait
around to be asked to dance. Claim your place. Put on your own shows, create
your own companies, develop your own projects. To steal a phrase from the Dali
Lama, “Be the change you want to see in the world." In other words, Be the
artworld you want to take part in.

Be crazy. Political art that just points to something and says “this is bad” is like
preaching to the choir. Try to change people's minds about issues. Do it in an
outrageous, unforgettable way. A lot of people in the art and film world didn’t
believe things were as bad as we said they were and we brought them
around....with facts, humor and a little fake fur. Here’s a trick we learned: If you
can get someone who disagrees with you to you to laugh at an issue, you have a
hook into their brain. Once inside you have a better chance of changing their
minds.

Be anonymous. You’d be surprised what comes out of your mouth when you’re
wearing a gorilla mask. We started wearing them to protect our careers, but soon
realized it was one of the secrets of our success. Anonymous free speech is
protected by the First Amendment. So join that long line of anonymous masked
avengers, like Robin Hood, Batman, and of course, Wonder Woman.

Be an outsider. Maybe having a secret identity isn’t for you. But even if you end
up working inside the system, act like an outsider. Look for the understory, the
subtext, the overlooked, and the downright unfair, then expose it. We’ve
empowered lots of people inside museums, universities and film studios to jam
their culture and dis their institutions.

Lead a double life. Be a split personality. Be two, three, four, five artists in one
body, like me. I’m an artist / activist / writer / graphic designer. Be a hybrid.
Hybrids are so green.

Just do one thing. If it works, do another. If it doesn’t, try it another way. Over
time, we promise you it will all add up to something effective and great. Don't be
paralyzed because you can't do it all right away. Just keep on chipping away.
Don't make only FINE art. Make some cheap art that can be owned by
everyone, like books and movies can.

Sell out. If people start paying attention to you, don’t waste time wondering if
you’ve lost your edge. Take your critique right inside the galleries and institutions
to a larger audience. When our work appears at venerable venues like the
Venice Biennale, the Tate Modern, or The National Gallery in DC, we get
hundreds of letters from people saying they were blown away by our analysis of
art and culture.

Give collectors, curators, and museum directors tough love: (Bear with me,
this is a long rant.) It’s a pity that public art museums have to compete with
billionaire art investors to own significant artworks. And then depend on those
investors to donate the works! It's outrageous that art by women and artists of
color sold at auction bring 10-20% of the price of art by white males. It's unethical
that wealthy art collectors who put lots of money in the art market can then
become museum trustees, overseeing museums that in turn validate their
investments. What a lousy way to write and preserve our history! If things
continue like they’re going, a hundred years from now, many museums will be
showing only the white male version of art history, with a few tokens thrown in.
You need to keep that from happening. Make sure that museums cast a wider
net and collect the real story of our culture.

How can you deliver tough love to the art world? Demand ethical standards
inside museums. No more insider trading. No more conflicts of interest! No more
cookie cutter collections of Art That Costs The Most (Eli Broad, do you hear us?)
While you’re at it, give some tough love to design and architecture, where women
and people of color face a crushing glass ceiling. And finally, educators out there,
don't teach a history constructed by corrupt institutions. Write your own!
Complain, complain, complain. But be creative about it. Sure we've done 45
feet high banners and billboards all over the world. But here's some simpler
things we've done: Put anti-film industry stickers in movie theatre bathrooms,
insert fliers with facts about art world discrimination into books in museum stores,
send anonymous postcards to museum directors. Want more ideas? How about
attaching political hangtags to items in clothing stores, putting up street art or
billboards across from your office, slapping stickers on fashion magazine covers.
You can probably think up a million better ideas than we can.

Use the F word. Be a feminist. For decades the majority of art school graduates
have been women. Your class is no exception. But after school, when you find a
too-small number of women and people of color in your field, especially at the
top, then you know there's got to be discrimination, conscious or unconscious,
going on. Don't just put up with it, say something. We think its ridiculous that so
many people who believe in the tenets of feminism have been brainwashed by
negative stereotypes in the media and society and refuse to call themselves
feminists. And guys, that means you, too. Time to man up, whether you're
female, male, trans, etc. and speak up for women. Women's rights, civil rights,
and gay, lesbian and trans rights are the great human rights movements of our
time. There's still a long way to go.

And last, but not least, be a great ape.
In 1917, Franz Kafka wrote a short story titled A Report to An Academy, in which
an ape spoke about what it was like to be taken into captivity by a bunch of
educated, intellectual types. The published story ends with the ape tamed and
broken by the stultified academics. But in an earlier draft, Kafka tells a different
story. The ape ends his report by instructing other apes NOT to allow themselves
to be tamed. He says instead: "break the bars of your cages, bite a hole through
them, squeeze through an opening…and ask yourself where do YOU want to
go?”

Make that YOUR ending, not the tamed and broken one.
Oh...And don't forget to have some serious fun along the way!!!!

legwear:  ripped jeans under a nightgown (yikes. it's a day to do s.o.l.e.)


inspiration:  facts, humor and a little fake fur


looking forward:  bookclub tonight

lady times solidarity

solidarity, yes!

in my years of teaching writing and literature, i've heard a lot of b.s. about sexism, racism, classism, (like how they don't exist, are not relevant any more since it's been sooooooo long since the civil rights bill passed, how feminism puts white dudes out of work, etc.)

you know, the people who are responsible for rush limbaugh still having a job.

which utterly defies logic.

sadly, most students are inexperienced and ill-informed, and are looking at the world from relatively priveleged eyes in the global scheme of things.

that's why i'm excited about international women's day on thursday, the vida count, the crunk feminist collective, one of my all time favorite websites woman stats *, and this article today.

this is a good week to get informed.  even if you think you're already totally rad and awesome, becoming more informed will make you even more sexy than you already are.

first fact to know:  ladies find smart people super hot. 

the facts are clear:  violence, poverty, and discrimination against women are still rampant, and, what woman stats makes clear is that where women are not educated, protected, and free, the entire community around them suffers right along with them.

take care of women, you're taking care of everyone.

it's only common sense, but sometimes we need a study to back up what we (should) already know.

p.s.--i'll be reading poetry this thurday at a women's day reading.  here's the info.

legwear:  black tights

inspiration:  getting the facts straight

looking forward: to international women's day

*  here's what woman stats is all about:  The WomanStats Project is the most comprehensive compilation of information on the status of women in the world. The Project facilitates understanding the linkage between the situation of women and the security of nation-states. We comb the extant literature and conduct expert interviews to find qualitative and quantitative information on over 310 indicators of women's status in 174 countries. Our Database expands daily, and access to it is free of charge.

girl power: ode to vida

the shameful numbers at the ny review of books

this blog, vida: women in literary arts, and this group of women writers is one of the most important things to happen for women writers. . . ever, i'd wager (i'd love to hear your thoughts on other important institutions and events that have promoted women writers and artists).

here's a classic example of girls kicking ass and getting out of tight places.

what they did, for those of you who haven't been following them, is start a thing called "the count" where they count how many women are being published, have bylines, are reviewing and are being reviewed in prestigious presses, journals, papers, and houses.

you might be surprised at how huge the inequity is.  or you might not. 

vida hasn't yet figured out the why, but they've got hard facts as to the what:  women are not getting published, awarded, or reviewed at anywhere near parity to men.

fact.

the count was started in 2010, and the 2011 results were just released.

so, cheers, vida, and thank you.

and thank you all you ladies who persist in the discouraging face of sometimes invisible, sometimes explicit, discrimination and keep doing it anyway.

legwear:  what's with the yoga pants?

inspiration:  shirking off discouragement

looking forward:  to tomorrow--got plans for saturday! no lurking about the house getting bummed out for this girl.

oh, and ladies:  you will be so much less prone to discouragement in a pair of beautiful new tights.  six more hours on the west coast to enter the GITP tights giveway.  just do it!

swank

so many little moments of inspiration today.

& so many little sad and happy moments.

first: the mountains.

the mountains.

i fell out of bed and went up to sundance with c. this morning to wait in line for ninety minutes for the best of fest tickets, free to locals, for the sundance film festival. the line was long and cooooold. i couldn't feel my toes. but the company was good. we waited in line with a dozen friends (locals) who are stalwarts about attending the festival (a half-dozen of these friends were siblings in one of those dynastic mormon families--cool, smart, liberal, interesting, artsy and large in number all with the same wide nordic eyes and cheek-bones. it thrills me that as adults they still like to hang out and attend sundance together).

then a short jaunt for a 44 oz. diet coke/dr. pepper cocktail at chevron with eva and friends before c. took her to the airport, manhattan bound again.

i will miss my beautiful girl more than i can say.

i imagined new york, and missed it, and wondered for the thousandth time what calls me back to the mountains always, though i see myself as one more at home in the gleaming temple of civilization rather than wandering the back-country of timpanogas.

then a glorious, swank afternoon with ingrid and lula, eating seven-layer bean dip with fritos in my bed and watching 9 to 5. o dolly! and lily! and jane! and their early eighties office attire.

that morning, on the drive down from sundance, i read in byu's student review a quote from political science professor valerie hudson, on her way to a swank endowed chair or something at texas a & m, saying that she didn't feel lds women were allowed their full equality: "despite the lds church's revolutionary doctrine concerning women, lds culture, lds traditions, and lds chapel practice often do not live up to the doctrinal vision we have been given by our prophetic leadership. . . . we as a people must stop living beneath our privileges on this score."

hudson has some interesting views on feminism, politics, and gender, many of which i disagree with, but i thought she was spot-on with that assessment. and she has done some of the most important work i know of in establishing the truth that gender parity is one of the most essential factors to the success of the human race with her woman stats project. she has provided sound empirical data that national security and welfare are dependent on the degree to which the women in a nation are a) alive and present, b) educated, and c) have access to freedom in public life.

for that reason, she's one of my heroines.

and the idea that we must "stop living beneath our privileges" rang out to me today with many implications. it goes back to the recent themes i've been harping on about living without regret, noticing the things that are free and good and appreciating them, and also perhaps a bit of re-framing for myself.

for instance: i don't need to pine for the skyscrapers of manhattan when i've got the skyscrapers of the wasatch mountains so close by that i can touch them. can i see them as temples of culture, the rock formations as sculpture in the MOMA, a hike as an artistic act?

so, anyway, though, back to dolly & co.: when they haplessly end up kidnapping their sexist boss who had been endlessly harassing all of the women in the office, dolly, his secretary, realizes that she can "sign his name better than he can." dolly, lily, and jane immediately set out to implement such progressive policies for the office as on-site daycare, job sharing, colorful decor, and, most importantly, equal pay for equal work by writing a plethora of memos signed by dolly.

the gals know they've been living beneath their privilege, and they take that privelege back for themselves, creating better conditions for all of the workers in the office, male and female.

mmmm-hmmm.

then ingrid requested a little american in paris for her last hour at home. i spent an hour wishing that gene kelley was fred astaire, and that someone else had written the script. still fun, though. and "paris" was real swank.

then ingrid left for bryn mawr. wah. not before, however, making me laugh so hard i cried whilst she kept saying hilarious things in german about her wandernkostum.

you probably had to be there.

i feel a little sad and empty with her gone.

then cecily learned to make rice, and, with almost every crumb of food in our house eaten up, we ate beans and rice and a winter salad with the few vegetables left in the drawer.

but i just read this, from alex kapranos' fantastic little book sound bites:

mme. taroudant brings me a tagine d'agneau. The clay is black with splashes hardened by the unforgiving fire, the ghosts of a thousand meals. Prunes fall from the stone. l'agneau falls from the y-shaped bone. i can't tell what kind of bone. i try to summon some knowledge of agneau anatomy, but give up. i don't care. it's magnificent.

i don't know if kapranos has some sort of ghostwriter or what. he's a damned good writer and sound bites is one of my favorite food books.

now lula and i will finish sons of perdition, a surprisingly beautiful documentary about kids who leave the fundamentalist polygamist community of colorado city. i haven't finished it yet, but so far i recommend it.

free things: re-reading and re-watching books and movies around the house, using up all the food in the house, sitting at the table with the kids, laughing with ingrid, thinking a lot.

inspiring things: don't live beneath your privilege.

legwear: dammit. same jeans four days in a row. finally threw them into the laundry. finally a shower and change at 6.30 pm. in an hour i'll put on a decent outfit and go to a party. it will include either black or grey tights.