Lecturas

The best part of these adventures seemed to be the way we went into hysterics describing them to each other. Otherwise, they were mostly joyless. We were attracted to men, but when it came to understanding and good talk, we needed each other. Gradually, the men were reduced to sex objects.
There is something very sad about this. Eventually, we came to accept the lying and the role-playing and the compromises so completely that they were invisible - even to ourselves. We automatically began to hide things from our men. We could never let them know, for example, that we talked about them together, that we discussed the way they screwed, that we aped the way they walked and spoke.
Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared. In the most paranoid societies (Arab, Orthodox Jewish) the women are kept completely under wraps (or under wigs) and separated from the world as much as possible. They gossip anyway: the original form of conciousness-raising. Men can mock it, but they can't prevent it. Gossip is the opiate of the oppressed.
But who was oppressed? Pia and I were 'free women' (a phrase which means nothing without quotes). Pia was a painter. I was a writer. We had more in our lives than just men; we had our work, travel, friends. Then why did our lives seem to come down to a long succession of sad songs about men? Why did our lives seem to reduce themselves to manhunts? Where were the women who were really free, who didn't spend their lives bouncing from man to man, who felt complete with or without a man? We looked to our uncertain heroines for help, and lo and behold - Simone de Beauvoir never makes a move without wondering what would Sartre think? And Lillian Hellman wants to be as much of a man as Dashiell Hammett so he'll love her like he loves himself. And Doris Lessing's Anna Wulf can't come unless she's in love, which is seldom. And the rest - the women writers, the women painters - most of them were shy, shrinking, schizoid. Timid in their lives and brave only in their art. Emily Dickinson, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Carson McCullers... Flannery O'Connor raising peacocks and living with her mother. Sylvia Plath sticking her head into an oven of myth. Georgia O'Keefe alone in the desert, apparently a survivor. What a group! Severe, suicidal, strange. Where was the female Chaucer? One lusty lady who had juice and joy and love and talent too? Where could we turn for guidance? Colette, under her Gallic Afro? Sappho, about whom almost nothing is known? 'I famish/and I pine' she says in my handy desk translation. And so did we! Almost all the women we admired most were spinsters or suicides. Was that were it all led?

Fear of flying, Erica Jong.

Averigüe qué tipo de votante del PRO es ud.

La vida es puro teatro

Es dura la vida del estudiante de Artes. Durísima. Si acaso después de todo el cine independiente, de escuchar los 4'33'' de absoluto silencio de John Cage y poner cara de moderno, de recorrer vernisasssshes donde reparten vino tóxico, después de todo, si uno sobrevive a todo eso, luego cae en las oscuras y crueles garras de las obras off-Corrientes (off-Corrientes, como en off-Broadway, claro chichises, qué gracia tendría inventar algo nuevo).

No se dejen estafar por una cosa horrenda que se llama "El juego del elástico", que bajo una supuesta modernidad (moderno = no se entiende un cazzo) disfraza la legitimación de los estereotipos más rancios. Claro, ya no la dan más, este post estaba en el arcón de los drafts desde el año pasado y hoy lo desempolvé, lo vi lindo, publicable, y lo puse; pero de la obra, si se les ocurre reponerla, uds huyan.

en fin

Le cuento a F. de cierto acontecimiento que me dejó boquiabierta y mal parada, y sin saber cómo comportarme o qué hacer.

me dice F. :

mi amiga fulana, que es psicóloga (cuando no) dice que es porque no sabemos ser mujeres

No sabemos ser mujeres. Qué lo parió.

Y yo pensaba que justo antes, de camino a casa, en la juguetería de la otra cuadra tenían en la vidriera disfraces para los actos escolares, uds saben, granaderos, sanmartines, chinas, gauchos y esas cosas y yo pensaba que nunca fui dama antigua. No señor, a mi me han tocado los peores papeles en la historia de los actos escolares. Hice de gaucho (había pocos varones), de vieja loca corriendo ratones con un cuchillo más grande que mi propio brazo (al compás de Three blind mice, threee blind mice, they all ran after the farmer's wife, who cut off their tails with the carving knife), de Guatemala, para un 12 de Octubre (Guate-mala, estamos?), y bueno, eso es como que te marca en la vida.

Y después quieren que una sepa.
No te digo.