Via Purse Lip Square Jaw:

Smutty French feminist theory for a Friday afternoon

From Luce Irigaray, When Our Lips Speak Together, Signs 6, 1977

"If we don't invent a language, if we don't find our body's language, its gestures will be too few to accompany our story. When we become tired of the same ones, we'll keep our desires secret, unrealized. Asleep again, dissatisfied, we will be turned over to the words of men - who have claimed to "know" for a long time. But not our body. Thus seduced, allured, fascinated, ecstatic over our becoming, we will be paralyzed. Deprived of our movements. Frozen, although we are made for endless change. Without leaps or falls, and without repetition."
...

Love Rode 1500 Miles

Love rode 1500 miles on a grey
hound bus & climbed in my window
one night to surprise
both of us.
the pleasure of that sleepy
shock has lasted a decade
now or more because she is
always still doing it and I am
always still pleased. I do indeed like
aggressive women
who come half a continent
just for me; I am not saying that patience
is virtuous, Love
like anybody else, comes to those who
wait actively
and leave their windows open.

-- Judy Grahn

"...someday you'll have a lovely wedding and we will all sidestep the bouquet and drink heavily. Just like we all dreamt of as girls."

But of course.

Smith calendar.

Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia"

Don't miss the play many critics believe is Stoppard's masterpiece. Directed by Sam Rush, the play opens on April 14 and runs through April 16, and April 20-23, at 8 p.m. each night in Theatre 14, Mendenhall. For Tickets: 585-ARTS.

Time Change for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

The time of The Smith College Symphony Orchestra's May 9 concert has been changed from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. in John M. Greene Hall. Tickets: $5, general, $1, Smith students. Ticket inquiries should be directed to (413) 585-3196. It is the 100th anniversary of the Smith College Orchestra, and in celebration the Smith Orchestra and Glee Club, with Jonathan Hirsh directing, will be joined by the Smith College Chorus, Deanna Joseph, director, and the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club, Stephen Lusmann, director. The program will also include works by Holst, Parry, Noble, Mendelssohn, and others. This concert will be performed at Carnegie Hall in New York City on Wednesday, May 11, as well.

Remember to remember what Mary wrote.

Is there a right time to read each book? A point of developing consciousness that corresponds with perfect ripeness to a particular poet or novel? And if that is the case, how many times in our lives did we make the match? I heard someone say, at a party, that D. H. Lawrence should be read during one's late teens and early twenties. Since I was nearing thirty at the time, I made up my mind never to read him. And I never have. Connoisseurs of reading are very silly people. But as Thomas Merton said, one day you wake up and realize religion is ridiculous and that you will stick with it anyway. What love is ever any different?

These past few weeks, my god.

Andrea Dworkin is dead.

Sunset in Appalachia, bituminous bulwark
Against the western skydrop.
An Advent of gold and green, an Easter of ashes.

If night is our last address,
This is the place we moved from,
Backs on fire, our futures hard-edged and sure to arrive.

These are the towns our lives abandoned,
Wind in our faces,
The idea of incident like a box beside us on the Trailways' seat.

And where were we headed for?
The country of Narrative, that dark territory
Which spells out our stories in sentences, which gives them an end and beginning . . .

Goddess of Bad Roads and Inclement Weather, take down
Our names, remember us in the drip
And thaw of wintery mix, remember us when the light cools.

Help us never to get above our raising, help us
To hold hard to what was there,
Orebank and Reedy Creek, Surgoinsville down the line.

-- Charles Wright