Friday Night Pleasures

[pegkerr]

I am tired of reading about death and stupidity. Death through stupidity. I came home and greeted the girls. Fiona had cleaned the bathroom. I talked for a little while on the phone with kijjohnson. I decided not to go out for dinner--money being a bit tight. I made a supper of whole wheat pasta with my homemade pesto, gauging the amount perfectly, so I had neither too much nor too little.

I am sporting the new haircut, the one which made my coworker say, "I'd love to get a cut that short, but my husband says it would make me look too butch," and I smirked and said, "That's Ms. Butch to you." It still has a few little glittery blond highlights left from the time I tried highlighting my hair for the first time earlier this summer.

I put on an old favorite pair of jeans, soft and supple, which curve confidently around my legs, and a white chemise with a subtle glitter of sequins at the neckline, and my denim jacket, decorated with the ribbons I've chosen and sewn on myself. I wore the heart earrings, the ones with tiny serene faces carved into the hearts, which dangle down at my jaw line and murmur into my ears, Damn, woman, you look good. I drove to Anodyne Coffeeshop [an·o·dyne, adj. 1. Capable of soothing or eliminating pain. 2. Relaxing; n. 1. A medicine, such as aspirin, that relieves pain. 2. A source of soothing comfort.]

I carefully considered the various choices of Sebastian Joe ice cream available. I asked for sample spoons of the raspberry chocolate chip, and the cinnamon-chocolate coconut. Hmm. Tough choice. "I'll take both, if you can give me a half scoop of each." No trouble in the least. I sat at the table by the window overlooking Nicollet and read the free copies of Lavender Magazine, Minnesota Women's Press, and The Onion ["God Outdoes Terrorists Yet Again"] The usual Friday night folksinger was there, this one ever so not-quite-slightly flat. I was in too good a mood to care. He wasn't loud enough to be entirely annoying.

I switched to reading Sherri Tepper's Beauty which was sometimes absorbing and sometimes a little bland. I folded down the edge of a page marking a section which she seemed have swiped from Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories," the bit about man being a subcreator:

[Puck says] The Holy One created the world beautiful and manifold and complicated, and the way it was made was the way He meant it to be! He wasn't just playing, making a toy world with the real world somewhere else. No, this is it! Anybody with eyes can see the truth of that. The Holy One wanted mankind to understand creation so he could create in his turn, for man's the only one among us who can create anything at all! Angels don't! They burn with a flame, like stars, but they don't create. Faery isn't! It grows and flowers, without much thought, and it doesn't create."

See what I mean? Substitute "Faery/angels" for Tolkien's elves, and it's the same thing.

I ordered a mocha (a double!) and a brownie, which was crumbly and fudgy, and chockful of nuts. I switched to a deep, cozy leather couch and put my feet up comfortably on the battered old coffee table. And finally, as the staff finished sweeping up and putting the chairs on the tables, I left, walking outside and feeling the humid air wrap around me like an embrace. I looked up at the stars.

Then I came home. Rob was washing the dishes when I came in, which means the kitchen will be clean in the morning. The kitchen smelled warm and sweet from the bread Delia had baked.

I came upstairs to tell you about it.

Comments

[liadan-m.livejournal.com]

You mean, in missing my regular Fri night listening to music at Anodyne, I missed meeting you?

Durn.

;)

How was tonight's music selection?

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Mm, I wasn't paying attention, to tell the truth, being more interested in what I was reading. It was a pleasant background. I'm sorry I missed you, too! Do you go there often?

[liadan-m.livejournal.com]

Most Fridays. A few of my friends telecommute from there Friday during the day, and if I (and usually a couple of the others) get there late or feel like it, we stay until 10 ish. My school schedule this semester means that Fridays where there is any expectation of company I will be at Anyodyne. Heck, I live on the 18's route! It's simple to get there and back.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Oh, what a lovely evening. Thank you for telling of it. It is a refreshing thing to read.

[amethistdolphin.livejournal.com]

Wow! is this kind of thing that makes me love reading your journal!

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I'm glad. I almost didn't post it, thinking it would be too banal and boring.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

I told my husband, who was cooking supper, that my lower back hurt. He said "I think you should take a hot bath." Me: "Yes, but I need to clean out the kids' bathroom first; it's a pit." (The adults' bathroom doesn't have a tub, just a shower. I haven't done a thorough bathroom-cleaning in months.) Him: "I'll clean out the bathtub so you can take a hot bath."

And he did. And I did, with a glass of white wine, a sparkling jasmine bath bomb, and the latest Harry Potter. And then I ate supper that he'd cooked.

I have the best husband in the entire universe.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Yes, he definitely sounds like a keeper. Congratulations!

[mangosong.livejournal.com]

That was delicious to read. ;) I'm glad you had such a wonderful evening!

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Tepper frustrates me for a number of reasons, probably all the more because I was an avid fan of her early work when I was in high school. But for one thing, I don't like the way she's evolved as a writer (before: small, contained, well-crafted stories that did their story-telling and then turned out the lights and went home. after: epic tomes in which the background of every character and every interaction is exhaustively explored) and for another it creeps me out to read the writings of a straight woman who appears to genuinely hate men. And I still haven't forgiven her for Gate to Women's Country. I haven't read Beauty though. (Hers, that is. I've read Robin McKinley's, of course.)

The 'subcreator' idea seems only a slightly different perspective on an age-old theme, especially regarding Faerie - that faerie can't create the beauty it worships, only humans create. I've written a couple things - a mediocre song and a fairly effective story-for-telling - which linked this explicitly with mortality, rather than huanity per se. (As the narrator of the story says, "Hello! Can't create the world without dying! Wake up and smell the compost--!") Basing it foremost on a perception of a single generative god and that god's intentions for humans is not a very far step - it seems to blend the 'only humans/mortals have the power to create' with the 'man as steward to the rest of creation' concept. I have some trouble with that, but then, I'm not Christian. I can appreciate the writing of those who are, of course, but you're right that this seems derivative and less thought-provoking or startling than it seems like it may have been supposed to be.

(The odd thing to me, when I come at it from my 'mortality is the crux of creation' point of view, is that the Christian model gives creation to humans secondary to their God, but their God is not mortal at all. In a lot of other stories, the world is formed from a god's body, or some way in the process of dying or being born, rather than as an act of craftsmanship.)

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Beauty has sections where I absolutely fall out of the story because I think, "Ok, the author is getting on her ranting hobby-horse here."

Have you read "On Fairy Stories"?

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I haven't. I take it I should?

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

I'd recommend it!

[http://users.livejournal.com/anam_cara_/]

wow. I love Tepper's work (though I just read The Visitor and didn't like it at all), and Gate to Women's Country was the first I ever read, and what made me fall in love. I didn't see it as a man-hating novel, but related to it as a mother with a son, a son that I wouldn't want to ever glorify war and the military. I also liked it because, because it demonstrates an angle/solution in its society that is deceptive- it seems logical and non-violent, yet when you look deeper, it's wrong, on many levels. It makes you think, and then go, 'wait a minute' and think again.

I'll admit that Beauty wasn't my favorite either, it was very clever, yet depressed the hell out of me. Gibbon's Decline and Fall is another favorite, and I also enjoyed The Fresco and Family Tree.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

The books you mention liking are, I believe, all pretty much from after I stopped reading Tepper (at any rate, I haven't read them), so it's very possible - likely, even - that she's gone on changing, and that many of the opinions I formed ten years ago or more simply don't hold true for her current writing. And, of course, it's all very personal. I am a big fan of (and own all nine of) the True Game series, although quite a bit of the Peter trilogy needs to be handled with care not to come off quite homophobic. Then there was Gate To Women's Country and after that I remember best Grass and Raising the Stones. I may have read more after those, but if so I don't remember them clearly.

I found them to be intensely disparaging of men, which made me uncomfortable. There's a tangled, murky, sexual ambivalence that seems to run through her books - she can't seem to leave the subject alone, but she can't make peace with it at all. Women are at the mercy of their need to have relationships with men, and yet inevitably victimized thereby.

I'm only describing what *I* perceived. Not only do I not expect everyone to share this perception, I'd be intensely surprised if very many did. It's just how /I/ felt.

Gate to Women's Country posed two basic and, to me, insurmountable problems. One of them is concrete and easy to set forward: once again (as in Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue trilogy and even Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic, Herland, we have a separatist women's community in which none of the women ever have sexual relations with each other. In Gate, women live only with women (and desexualized male servitors) for most of the year - and have to wait until the brief annual period of interaction to have sex. Moreover, there is a fleeting mention (on page 71 of the most common paperback edition, if my memory serves me correctly) of how the society's advances in medicine had made it possible to eliminate/cure homosexuality and other genetic defects before birth.

I'm really /not/ very easy to offend, but that managed it. But although that glancing obliteration of my life and lifestyle offended my politics, the greater problem by far was the narrative of women living with women but with no sexuality among them, which offended my sense of plausibility.

So there's that. The other problem I had was that in what purported to be (or was claimed by others to be - I don't know Tepper's opinions on the subject) a feminist separatist utopia, albeit a very murky and grim utopia, the crux of the plot revolves around the male characters, and in the climax, the strong female character is incapable of saving herself or anyone, and has to be rescued by an act of gross violence from her emasculated male servant.

/Yuck/. To me this book ended up undermining everything feminist it supposedly endorsed. It said, once again, "Any attempt of women to live without men is delusional and doomed. And moreover, the reason men are indispensible is that men are the purveyors of gross violence; you're going to need violence so you can't do without men." I think I'd be at least as bothered by this book if I were male or if I were a straight woman as I presently am.

Brrrrr. Thinking like that would make one's head a scary place to be. I think that is what you were talking about when you described the 'solution' as deceptive, and not as logical or nonviolent as it initially appeared, and I agree with you. But the problem I have is that even if the society isn't expected to be seen as feminist or idyllic, the book is generally considered to be feminist - and I see it as very, very much not.

Of course, maybe she was deliberately writing horror depicting ugly and inescapable gender roles, and everyone I've talked with about it has just been wrong about the genre.

I'm sure there are lots of really good things about the book too. I'm glad you got things you valued from it. I feel sorry that the things that bothered me bothered me so much that I couldn't see them or can't remember them.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

I am sporting the new haircut, the one which made my coworker say, "I'd love to get a cut that short, but my husband says it would make me look too butch," and I smirked and said, "That's Ms. Butch to you."

((swoons in admiration))

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I probably would have found Sebastian Joe's through someone else's recommendation by now, but I got my first scoop of it in the middle of the stress of moving in because I read about it here on your lj. I got the raspberry chocolate chip that night, too, and it was good. (timprov got the blueberry. Wish they had it more often.)

Sometimes it's an abstract, general kind of good to read about the small pleasures in someone else's life. But sometimes it's a concrete, inspiring kind of good: hey, I could do that. I think I will do that! Thanks.

[bethynyc.livejournal.com]

Beautiful. Can I have that day too?

I'll just make myself a cup of Rasberry Earl Grey tea and read my flist and write!

(oh, and pay the electric bill)

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

Oh, absolutely beautiful. What a great evening.

[diony.livejournal.com]

Thank you for coming upstairs to tell me about it; reading this made my eyes fill with tears, because it so beautifully describes a sort of evening I find perfect.

And it occurs to me, somewhere far back in my brain, that if the book you were reading was non-fiction instead of fiction -- I mean, if you were studying that as something real instead of reading a novel -- this would be a few pages out of an urban fantasy.

But I'm glad it's real, and that you had it.