| in america 16 part 5 - 2009 january | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
6 January 2009 $1000 from Dave, which I'll use to telecine Trapline and Bright and dark. All day I'm taking pleasure in the new shape of this room. The sleek corner, black glass. Silver aluminum: the CD box, the Mac, the monitor, the drawer handles, the speaker fabric; birch-colored wood: the speakers and the box of drawers. My lamp another century next to the wall. Paned west window where I can stand next to it now, and face the moon from my pillow. A sleek workroom. When I had the monitor on there was room to spread journal, G3, ref books, files. I've arranged the cords. The TV can reach another socket if I want it to. 7 None of that says it. The room is larger, as if it's 6 feet wider. It was chunky and is fitted. I'm devotedly keeping the surfaces clear. - How come it has taken six years to figure it out. I didn't ask the question until I needed to work in the monitor. Money: last two years big expenses for jeep and equipment. I owe Rowen's fund almost $12,000 which would cost me 200/mo for 5 years to repay. I haven't been paying it back but also I haven't been increasing it. My credit cards are clear except for Tom's loan. Am almost set up, after the transfer it will be just small stuff. 142 this morning in spite of eating a lot of carbs. Bringhurst: In the careful language of science and poetry, hyphens can be more important still. Consider the following list of names: Douglas-fir, balsam fir, Oregon ash, mountain-ash, redcedar, yellowcedar, Atlas cedar, white pine, yellow pine, blue spruce. All these names are correct as they stand. They would be less so if an eager but ignorant editor tried to standardize the hyphens. The terms are written differently because some are made from nouns that are only borrowed, others from nouns that are generic. The balsam fir is what it claims to be: a fir; the Douglas-fir is not; it is a separate genus waiting for a proper English name. The Oregon ash, likewise, is an ash, but the mountain ash is not, and the Atlas cedar is a cedar, but redcedar and yellowcedar (or yellow-cedar) are not. The differences, though subtle, are perfectly audible in the speech of the knowledgeable speakers (who say balsam fir and Douglas-fir and mountain-ash and Oregon ash). A good typographer will make the same distinction subtly visible as well. On close inspection, typefaces reveal many hints of their designers' times and temperaments, and even their nationalities and religious faiths. If, for example, you are setting a text by a woman, you might prefer a face, or several faces, designed by a woman. Garamond belongs to the world of Renaissance Catholicism Jannon belongs to the Reformation Méridien is more in touch with the secular spirit of twentieth century Swiss industrial design Italic is the subsidiary and 'feminine' font in post-Renaissance typography An author who quotes Greek or Hebrew or Russian or Arabic fluently and gracefully in speech should be permitted to do likewise on the page. Practically speaking, this means that when the alphabets are mixed, they should be very closely balanced both in color and in contrast. Maori and Hawaiian, for example - which are long on vowels and short on consonants, compose into a texture even creamier than Latin. informal entry and exit strokes left by a relaxed and fluent writer In the later Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, a well-trained European scribe might know eight or ten distinct styles of script ... each had certain uses and particular forms evoked specific languages and regions. relationship between letterforms and the other things that humans make and do The forms are quiet and alert ... axis is that of the humanist hand. [opposite page: notes on design of a couple of fine art books] 8 Polite reply from Mary Tiles - "intriguing" - but she said she'd forward to students and statcounter showed a couple of Hawaii's, so she did. Denny's in PB, waiting to have the taillight fixed. Crossing the parking lot, sea air. Outside table. Fan palms with their stems in tatty baskets. Thursday morning. I still have four weeks of own time, after the holidays, probably after the rain. Yesterday ripped through Bringhurst learning fine points. Have figured out to use CreateSpace and how to handle the published-by question. Sizes and cream paper are okay. Every author should have own block of ISBN. Ant Bear to have embodiment studies line and an art line. A We made this book? / website. "Actually, her taste is very conservative, kind of jock-preppy, a version of a safe American WASP way of dressing," said Andrew Bolton, curator of the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "But what is truly compelling about her is her body. She has an athletic, commanding and confident presence that is very American." "She may look great in a shift dress," he said, "but her body is so strong that I end up forgetting what she's wearing much of the time." 9 Caryn saying she wants F and me to talk about the difference between consciousness studies and embodiment studies. I immediately jump into it - teeth bared - I'll see what he's up to and demolish him - so I read his letter to Kri, which is boorish, says "the body is passé" - ! - it's an archetype and we don't really know whether it exists. What else - he suggests Chalmers as a sophisticated dualist - so I look up Chalmers who's a star among the philosophers - he's an anti-materialist - and then the contemplative traditions. So what's my relation to CS as F does it - students who come from him are ungroundedly theoretical and often grandiose - not well dug into what they're doing. I suspect he's patriarchal in deep hidden impulse, he likes being a priest with ancient lineages behind him. I don't believe he is any kind of original thinker. I know he's a drinker and that suggests persistent dissociation. He comes from money. Is a womanizer. Embodiment studies the way I understand it also is deeply temperamental - it comes out of the way I see and know, the way when I evaluate for instance Francis, I look at his body, how he stands, the fact that he drinks every night. I don't separate those facts from my evaluation of his program. What I offer my women students is a way of standing in their actual circumstance when they plan their work, not disregarding themselves. I'm not interested in consciousness as such. I'm interested in a lot of things people consider part of consciousness - particulars of perceiving, feeling, particulars of imagining and thinking. Have gone to art to learn the resources of these things - arts of sentient being. But I'm also interested in indications of nonconscious response and knowing, I love science as a story that keeps opening into more comprehension and observation. Evolutionary theory is a very precious accomplishment and it is under attack. There are visions of body that originate in body/soul/mind dualism that imagine it in a limited way, and anyone holding these visions feels a hypothesis that physical reality is it, as a fall - a closing-down of hope and happiness of being. We can say instead that whatever people, animals, plants can do, it's being done by physical systems, and that upgrades our vision of physical systems. I start with body because it lets me imagine a human situation where we belong in the world. Where we're embedded, implanted. In that paradigm, embodiment studies is the umbrella - consciousness studies would be how do bodies do whatever they do consciously. Environmental studies would be how do bodies, human and other-than-human, coexist in environments. TLA would be how do bodies use language to alter their structure, how do communities of bodies use language to alter their structure. In Francis's idealist version embodiment studies would be part of CS, ie the study of biological bodies, and a person's self-experience of being a body would be a sub-type of consciousness - like European phenomenology, bracketing of Husserl, Heidegger. So would others and the world - it's a solipsistic stance. It's a new paradigm and students aren't mostly able to shift very far. I start them with books that reframe their emotional situation as female bodies - Carol Gilligan, Susan Griffin - they are both critiques of patriarchy in terms of dissociation - Adrienne Rich on lying - Philosophy in the flesh - Damasio - Edelman and Freeman on consciousness - Being about if they're up for a whole epistemology. I don't debunk their experience - I talk about careful attention to the difference between description and explanation - show that they don't need the explanations, and that they can ground further in what they actually know. They can love and be interested in their own being as much or more in this vision.
I'm not interested in proofs or arguments, I'm interested in demonstrating what we can do under this hypothesis. I'm interested in showing the subtle effects of implicit dualisms, for instance in our language. It's a basic hands-on form of philosophical investigation: what will be different if we say it this way instead of that way? About contemplative traditions - I would say here's a place where it's particularly important to discriminate between description/method and explanation. There are a lot of practical implications for how to do an MA.
The culture has been shifting - 60s shift - Barack and Michelle - here embodied would mean less dissociated. I also like this vision because it has existential courage - it doesn't dodge tragic facts like deformity, disease, death, infirmity. We die, we die before we die. [opposite page: CreateSpace notes, ISBN notes] 11th On the monitor making little images - what looks good at 200 pixels. 12 The brilliance of the monitor, the way it makes the slides what they are optimally, when they're projected big.
Monday morning, nearly 9. An exquisite Santa Ana morning. White hiss since I woke. What's up.
Letter from Martin - I'm halted in saying anything about it, in case he wanders into the journal someday - mainly there isn't much you in it, though he says he'd like to write occasionally as a friend if that suits me. He writes about skiing in the woods at nightfall, his grandparents' farm in Devon, family events, his prep school in Dorset, his grandmother at the Slade, reading Pepys' three first volumes and dealing with Colombian immigrants. Doesn't mention what I thought was ravishing in my letter, the passages about Ken and Labrador. And then the Shakespeare line in the note. He thinks of me as a stimulating female I suppose, but isn't going to let himself be very stimulated. Mostly his letter demonstrated class and declared family loyalty. - The solution to inhibition writing about people who may read what I say is to push through and be just. These mornings transcribing 1974 notebooks. Boring notes and quotes - wondering what to make of the way the notebooks display a callow person who at the same time was making Trapline. I wasn't callow in the little notes about London or about Tony or Luke, but most of the quotes and worst the remarks on reading are junk. I have a pang seeing how London played with me everywhere I went because I was sweetly goodlooking. Workshop - is there something lively I can do with awareness - put muscle against Francis on his ground. Sigh. Photos:
13 Woke from a paranoid dream about [the college] - Karen Campbell telling me someone in admin had been saying my letters aren't good - I saying stoutly that if I can't do the work I'm good at, I don't want to work there - and that I don't now trust her. So I should think about [school] for a moment. Campbell weaseled to Margo for Francis. Goldberg is up to something, wanting Francis and me to talk about the difference between consciousness studies and embodiment studies. Ruth is too blank and formal to hold the fac together the way Margo did. Apart from Jim, no one had spine for Margo. I started trouble with various things I said in Fading before I password-protected it. I declare contempt for the fac by not living with them. I do all I can for students. My workshops are electrifying - I'm protean and grand and no one else is. In another year - from March - so make that three more semesters - I'm eligible for Canadian pension's tiny amount - tiny amount. Having said all that I'm calmed down. Mostly I don't want [the college] to cross my threshold.
Page totals for the monograph - approx 150 Stress of enterprises - setting up [digital] transfer for Monday - decisions for Mike's project - waiting for emails - feels like pressure at the heart - appointment in LA on Monday 1 pm - trying to think about ch 10, took off the first section, is that enough - ref section for the intro? He wants black borders off the slides, do I agree with that? - have to pull some frames. Huge lot of money to be spent. Tom not working and looking like something's wrong with him, a black eye that happened overnight. It's Tuesday afternoon, the window is open, sun on the dry leaves of Richard's sycamore. Second day of a strong Santa Ana. Second day where the silver hiss hasn't stopped though I've swallowed the magic supps. - L'heure bleue There are three established and widely accepted subcategories of twilight: civil twilight, nautical twilight and astronomical twilight. Civil sun less than 6o below horizon, brightest stars - civil dawn, civil dusk. Nautical 6-12 degrees, sailors can take reliable star-sights, traces of objects still faintly visible, nautical dawn and dusk. Astronomical 12-18 degrees (diameter of the sun is .5o), nebulae still can't be observed though it's dark. 14 Have sent the journal to Mike this morning - Louie said yes, it's about what's needed for hard creation - read it through this morning - it seemed alright. "Discipline and knowing one's misery while one pushes through. The only way to eventually get soul back is to notice when it comes and goes as you do in these bits." Wednesday - what I have to do - money from downtown and into bank, something about Corinna and ticket scaring me, why does she need to talk to me on the phone - small images and frame grabs for what I already have. - Done. Have tickets. Have exchanged the $500 Canadian and stuck it in the bank to begin to pad what's there enough to pay for the transfer on Monday. Have pulled some out of Dave's G&F fund too. Will $1600 be enough? Have compared Being Being about with the beginner's thoughts in 1974 - that was walking the bike uphill on 5th coming from the foreign exchange place and the library, where I was looking at format for art books. Now it's night. 15 What I should do now - there's the silver hiss - it was gone yesterday - should I make up the workshop. Here: pressure, 'consciousness' versus a responsive field, what is a moment of presence, the dark outskirts. Tom replying to Being Being about - makes two suggestions, both wrong, and doesn't mention the bits he's in - both these facts hurt my feelings - the bits he is in are loving memorializings of his being, and his being wrong tells me I am with a stupid man who doesn't have good taste even in his area. That hurts me because it suggests that I should leave. But I don't leave, I stay for the sake of the kid. It's a balancing. So do I have to repeat my mother's cowardice? It says no. It's different because I have my own life in its right proportion. Attachment is true and somehow minor. Am I giving it as much as it's due? It says yes. In relation to him is it a corruption? No because I give him as much as he will accept. At OB this morning looking down from the pier into sea water - pale green with a depth of flickering glitter - pale clouds of silt hanging and swaying, generating the turning bits - long shadow streaks thrown parallel from small bumps on the surface - seaweed shreds hanging in shifting images, dark orange little shreds and curls - that dark orange suspended in silvered pale green side-lit and swaying, an exquisite movie. A wave shoves over it, a mess of white, which slowly dies into a separating skin, which thins away to none. [opposite page: notes on format of the Starns' book] 16 My lecture - have just looked at Dragon girls and am awed - what can I do that's as rich - what I've thought of - something about love woman - handless maiden? - Eurydice? - something about presence body/consc etc - something comparing consc stud and mbo. Best workshops: language, body as spirit - sky, Dragon girls. Dragon girls had psychology but it had history and literature too. In Biel a disaffected technological male is taken through a rebirth whose figure is a little girl herself going through an initiatory ordeal. Dream figures. Dragon girls asked for fierce largeness. I'm dopey, that thick slow feeling in my head, can hardly work, feeble. I was looking at Orpheus notes and came on a section of Susan. Stabbed. I closed everything on the desktop, put it away. That voice can touch the quick in a second. I'm not at the end of the significance of that. It was an extraordinary moment. Both ways, I think. Did I work hard enough? Did she? And we've both fallen back from it. But if it was the furthest I've been, can I work from it still. Somehow. Saturday 17th When I woke I was thinking of the week in Alberta, which I haven't summarized for myself - it was dark and cold, isolated in a blank motel room, eating and driving with a pompous goblin. The image that's come often, that I haven't seen yet, is of the lecture room full of people, my countrypeople, people who've come to hear me speak, and I can't see them or speak to them individually. There's none of it that's mine. Status accrued but it is nothing. Speaking to the classes was good. Seeing Eliz was good. I liked driving to the river and seeing the settlement. I liked seeing from Saskatoon Mountain. - I like being able to transfer the rest of my movies Monday because Dave gave me this $1000, and digitizing all those photos because Dave gave me the first $1000. Love woman - talking about her, talking as her - Eurydice's voice. Okay, Eurydice's voice.
Moon at the half, consc and nonconsc. They are always there side by side. Day half. It's about being both. Eurydice IS the underworld.
- Tom and I decided to call his gifts when he had money and my loans now even - that's fair - he wants to promise future gifts and I said no that leaves me holding it. It's the right decision. I burst out when we were coming from OB on Thursday. I was keeping the tank full and he was using it and I was looking ahead to maintenance costs I was going to have to pay. A blood vessel had burst under his eye. He's scraping for food money. I was beginning to see that I was enabling, he hasn't been getting on with his next thing. He was starting to assume he has the jeep. So today we said this is bad for us, he has to work from his own means now. I'll have to watch him scramble without helping and we won't be able to travel together, or do much at all, because he doesn't like to do anything when he doesn't have money, but I can work with this. I can't work with waiting for him to pay a debt. There is something else though. I liked it when he gave me money because it acknowledged that I've given him a lot. More than he's given me, emotionally. Taking it back undoes that thanks. So I feel it. Seemingly. 19 But then it was alright. I stopped at his house with a ten-pound bag of oranges and a decaff latte and the NYT to sit in his kitchen with the doors open, and there he was, not the tight ugly fool but the west wind face in its pagan otherworldliness. That so does not tell it. We looked through the Times magazine which was called Obama's people and had a long series of full page portraits of his cabinet and staff, an inspired inaugural gesture. In the op-ed pages there were pieces by writers from his various communities, Occidental College, Columbia, Harvard, Indonesia, Chicago. The Hawaiian writer in her final two paragraphs described a photo of him body surfing with easy grace, an island boy. I read it to Tom and cracked before I got to the end and he had wet eyes too. Why. The coming true. Our post modern boy represents an undivided intelligent body whose wife is 5'11", who loves his daughters personally and doesn't leave the kids to her. Who can describe her as both utterly familiar and utterly mysterious. Who is a pleasure to look at, never not. Who is earned trust in all directions. Who is demonstrating what it is to be at full stretch as a life. But who also plays to the stupid or maybe is stupid in important ways - wanting his kids to believe in Santa, professing Christianity. I'm not sure about the Lincoln train and the size of the inauguration splash - is that messianic? Or a right celebration on behalf of the oppressed who can claim him. It's 6:22 on a Monday morning when I am going to catch the 8:10 train to LA with Trapline and Bright and dark and a 500GB hard drive. - Union Station. I just missed the 5:10 and have until 8:30. Victory Street in Glendale. I was on a wide concrete bus bench waiting for the 96. There was a late sun, 4:30 sun gentle on downscale wide street, cookie factory a block up, little strip mall behind me, Vietnamese food, a liquor store. Cheap motel. Maladroit Canary Island pines beside me. Across the street a man lifting oxygen tanks onto his pickup bed. Rising above him, further on in the direction I'd come from, a long ridge of unbuilt mountain, warmly lit chaparral. In the blue over the pines, a contrail drifting and fattening. Cars stopped at the light. Mayo and salsa tubes left behind on the bench. What did I like about it. The telecine session was hard. I had to direct a young man who was setting colors and contrast so Trapline was wrecked. - There's a lounging black man with an Obama/King teeshirt. I had to say, "Less contrast, even less. Can we get less pink in the white?" He was courteous but he didn't have an eye. What I meant to say was that it had been hard and it was done, as well as I could do it this time, and I was sitting on warm smooth concrete in a strange town with nothing more to do but wait for the bus under the distant realness of the mountain. Why was I thinking of Frank. There was a man at the next table in khaki work pants and shirt, and I thought Frank had never been in this station and didn't make this sort of journey after he married. - Isn't this his death anniversary, I think, January 19. Frank, I'm three years older than you now. In the bagel shop monitor a small silver haired woman - not as small as her - a dwarf with a suitcase rolling behind her - in a very red shirt. The date on Trapline 34 years ago. 22 Thursday heavy and blank. Rain forecast for a week. I'm waiting for my transfer [to arrive] so I can pull images, dabbing at the lecture I don't know what to do with. Watched the inaug with Tom all day Tuesday and yesterday still wanted to be there seeing grace alert. Views from the platform up the Mall, which was a reddish carpet that would sometimes boil like film grain. The man straight and narrow in his good black overcoat. His cheek muscle jumping when that stupid flab Rick Warrender made a pious speech in the guise of a prayer. His face lit when Aretha in her hat like an African headcloth built in rhinestoned grey felt opened her mouth and began sublimely. She was a grey old bulk and her phrasing was authority - what some singers can do, put more curve into a curve - what the mediocre white poet didn't do, hewing to the humbly safe. It was her job to name the mythic and she didn't dare show herself large enough. Hideous Bush, lightlessly grey, demolished in office, become shame without knowing he is that, carrying his bluff to the end, grinning genially from the helicopter steps. Michelle in yellow the tall queen holding the bible in her green gloves, holding his hand when they strolled waving, changing hands when she wanted to wave with her other arm. The thoughtful daughter in dark blue, the bold daughter in orange and pink. What should the poet have said. She should have named his beauty and that other thing, that he has chosen to be large. He is the book. People everywhere weeping to see the radiant shadow confident at last, confirmed.
A split path - who goes underground. The poems. Something about music, something about being seized, something about going into the dark, something about a couple split into a lost one and a searcher, the ordeals of the quest. Evoking the multiplicity of myth. Love woman as a crisis. What wildness means - fear, hope, adoration, self division, instability, uncontrol, beauty, terror, pain, joy. What's my own real question - fugitive beauty. Eurydice's voice: Love Woman and the dark descent A struggle there has sometimes seemed to be, between an overwhelmed beauty and a cut-off competence - Bliss and Executive, Love Woman and Work Woman, others have their own versions of an unresolved duality whose effects can be confusion, indecision, stasis. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is one of many mythic evocations of this structure. Something about music, something about being seized and carried away, something about a marriage split in two. Male poets and musicians have seen themselves as Orpheus in quest of his music in this story, but women's relation to the tale is more complex: we are both figures in the story, the split pair is us, we are both the raw girl swept into the uncon and the encultured competence grieving her loss in a diminished world. This session will consider who in us is lost and who is searching. Will look at some of the ways the story has been told. Some of the ways the story has been felt. Will look at the myth as a story of female ---. Some of the ways students have worked with this structure. In the myth Orpheus is the poet and singer, and Eurydice, a ghost in darkness, is voiceless, the goal of the quest, maiden, but In Ovid's version she is not recovered, Orpheus goes on without her. The story of ego and unconscious. Like the waxing half moon when it is seen in daylight, the white half shows and the dark half is there implied. I was at a women's liberation conference in London, about 1972, in the front row of a balcony. Below, between sessions, I saw a young woman kneeling in the aisle talking to her friends. She was a pink, blond girl, a bit slow and heavy, and she had a quality I loved to see, she was feeling intensely and naturally, she was the sort of girl who would blush easily. Her responsiveness to everything would show in her face but she wouldn't speak those feelings or act on them - she was intensely present but as response rather than action. At the conference there was also another woman I loved to see. She was a dark thin American, an honoured woman's liberation leader, a public warrior, articulate, aggressive and engaged. I was a young woman looking for what I wanted to be as a style in the world. I wanted to be both power and privacy, and yet I knew I couldn't be them both, they were incompatible. The girl whose whole being was present and feeling would have to override her large consciousness to make a speech and if she tried to write from her global fullness she would begin to narrow herself. Once she had taken the road of action the warrior woman would not be able to go back to blushing realness. I thought about what to call the two ways. I was very aware that the contrast I was thinking about had for some while been called a contrast between masculinity and femininity. I wasn't going to perpetuate that description; it was obvious that both ways were open to me as a woman, whatever my cultural habit. I eventually settled on calling it a contrast between attention and assertion. Perception and action. It seemed to me there was something blind about action - a sort of diving in with eyes closed, where reserved perception continues to see and feel all the while. I stayed in the perception side for a lot of years after that. I watched and felt and sometimes made something, films, photos, pieces of writing. There was a lot of suffering and sometimes great beauty. I was driven into defeat in this position, shamed so badly that I turned. I chose power, but I became a power making beauty. I was public, I was a warrior, and I made exquisite beauty and was beautiful. That was a balanced bothness I hadn't known I could be. The beauty wasn't an underworld beauty, it was a blazing garden, I wasn't thinking about a dual, I was easily consulting feeling all the time, as I was in the midst of action. Feeling told me what to do and I did it. Then I took myself to school, where I was powerfully prevented from acting. I couldn't carry the marriage forward. Did I split? No, I knew I was suffering there and I acted secretly. I prepared to act. I prepared on behalf of my girl self. And now I am the warrior fighting for the girl but I no longer am the girl. What I feared has happened. Universities make it happen. There's a strong danger in education, as well as a strong gift. The danger is being trained in dissociation. The gift is being shown how to focus. So what is the girl. Realness. Presence. Feeling. Perception. What is Eurydice's voice? It's being. Francis calls that 'consciousness' and wants to be theoretical about it as if it were abstract, but it's not abstract, it's the you-and-me-ness of being, it's the togetherness of mother and infant, mutuality. Attentive and assertive - that was another form. How much you there is in me. Eurydice's voice is her body's visible mutuality.
23 Friday night. There is the grey metal box I haven't opened yet. "We all know what his choices were in dating. He chose a woman as tall as him, as smart as him, and black from a distance ... there is a fundamental goodwill in him toward African-American women." Bill Moyers interviewing two black women on Obama's options and priorities. "What did you make of the god talk all week?" Working on Eurydice this week looking at student letters seeing what good work embodiment studies has inspired. 24
Dreamed - what do I want from writing this dream - the moment of confusion, seeing the large moon, not sure which direction I was facing. I had had a beer, which was pale green and like lemonade, and gone through the rocks to the narrow beach and warm sea. I was going to be leaving this place in the morning and I wanted to take off my clothes and enter the water. I had got a little distance into it and it was much darker. I couldn't see the shore, I stumbled against a little shoal. There was a large full moon and I though I could orient by it (a large white circle in blackness) but then it wasn't there any more. What kind of day is it. There's sun on the palm. Richard's sycamore with rusty leaves that haven't fallen. I want to remember to say that Tom has two ways of answering the phone. When he says "Hey" he's there and real and we'll have a good time. When he says "Hey, how ya doin'" he's freaked and doesn't know it. Facing this way is better. I can see the birds I hear in the sycamore. I can see light from the east flat onto the palms and the white plaster of that apartment building. The fan palm's fringes are flowing. There's pink on a little smudge of cloud. An open sky that yesterday was closed. - And then I took on Quicktime - learned the weaknesses of my system - it couldn't play either movie right though I got enough for frame grabs and learned some about color - which was some fixable. 27
FCP:
Trapline DVD
NY Times mag Jan 25 09, p28 Men and women shown het sex, male-male, female-female, bonobo, man masturbating, woman masturbating, nude woman exercising, nude man walking on a beach. Bloodflow measures on penis and in vagina. Men gay or straight categorical response, neither to bonobos. Doesn't seem to be inhibition. Subjective report correlated with plethysmograph. Women responded to all of it except strolling unaroused man. Subjective report uncorrelated - "especially for straight women" - in the direction of their idea of themselves. Differences during ovulation. Higher the drive in women, greater resp to all kinds. For men, higher drive more specific. the split between women's bodies and minds 30 In women, the main difficulty appears to be in the mind, not the body ... [Viagra] can promote blood flow and lubrication, but this doesn't do much to create a conscious sense of desire. A serotonin-enhancing drug seems to do that, and testosterone. research suggesting men are better able than women to perceive increases in heart rate ... may rely more on such physiological signals to define their emotional states, while women depend more on situational cues. So there are hints that the disparity between the objective and the subjective might exist, for women, in areas other than sex. And this disconnection, according to yet another study ..., is accentuated in women with acutely negative feelings about their bodies. She thinks that partly because of rape evidence - "difference between reflexive sexual readiness and desire" - "a rudderless system of reflexive physiological arousal" - "whether the cognitive domain of lust is more receptive than aggressive." I've often thought that there is something really powerful for women's sexuality about being desired. She guesses she will find that women are most turned on, subjectively if not objectively, by scenarios of sex with strangers. Oxytocin system relies on estrogen. Really, she said, women's desire is not relational, it's narcissistic - it is dominated by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. 46 Another way of imagining two systems: lust versus value. It's wrong to think that because relationships are what women choose they're the primary source of women's desire. 1. Women have lower drive, 2. women more likely to lose interest in long relationships. The choosing isn't happening, he's trapped.
[Opposite page: notes on framegrabs from Notes in origin] [Notes on white hiss] [List of images sent to Mike]
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