Rather comically I have from a fairly young age, thought forward to wanting to be “wise” and the practice of being an elder. I found some of Suzette Haden Elgin‘s ideas useful there though I think in actual practice what I took from her writing is perhaps different from both what she intended by it and how she lived it. Sometimes she exhibited that wisdom in action and sometimes she didn’t – whomst among us, etc. But we can aspire, right?! Here’s an example of guidelines she came up with:
1. An Elder almost always teaches by example.
2. An Elder gives advice only when it’s asked for, except in dire emergencies.
3. An Elder is able to stay detached.
4. An Elder is, above all, consistent.
5. An Elder is safe to be with.
6. An Elder knows how and when to listen.
7. An Elder is compassionate.
8. An Elder has “presence.”
I am not so systematic. (Waffle-headed, holographic or holistic, if you are kind)
My own mantra for putting something like ‘eldering’ into practice, is a lot more simple. It has been, “young people already respect you, they don’t want to hear you talk about yourself so much, what they want or need is for you to listen to their ideas and dreams and validate them”. If I want to talk about myself all day long, which I of course enjoy, I have THIS VERY BLOG in which to do so!!!
Like Marcus Aurelius, because of my impulses to blather on all day, I have to remind myself frequently to stfu and listen and learn from younger people. Whenever I do focus my attention on The Youth (an increasingly flexible and vast category where more and more people, oddly, belong for me), it is a great thing.
There are other underpinnings to this idea – for example I already more or less KNOW what I think and feel and am capable of getting bored with myself. But also also, I feel like if I fully “unfurl” as Danny and I describe it, I feel like I’m this enormous juggernaut and it is a bit overwhelming. (We both enjoy that we are not Too Much for each other and can fully unfurl our sails and superpowers, like vast multidimensional entities.)
If you are older you automatically have done and experienced a bunch of shit that is difficult, interesting, and long to describe! We do not want anyone younger to have the impression that:
* the important things have already happened
* you fucking missed it, you worm
No!!! You did not miss it! History is NOW! You are IT!!!!! You are IMPORTANT!!!! Pay attention to the people around you NOW because they too are IMPORTANT and you are a(n) artistic & literary & cultural SCENE!!!!
I will keep repeating this until morale improves!!!
Some years ago despite my being Extremely Young Still people started referring to me (to my face) as an actual disabled elder or queer elder (or both). How disconcerting!
The whole vibe of this also ties in to my early ambitions to be a professor (mostly so I could get that bow tie ). I have only taught one semester of college English but enjoyed it greatly! Since I have a different career, my professor fix comes from informal associations (or non hierarchical places like Noisebridge). Though perhaps I will teach some of my dream classes in world lit, the history of zines, etc. someday when I “retire”. Anyway, my point is that you can Professor it up but that is less about lecturing and more about mentoring by listening to intelligent and motivated people and hyping them up; suggesting reading, research, directions, projects, and so on.
That was a lot of explanation to come to my Very Small Epiphany this morning as I put together a little package of tiny zines and stickers to send to a stranger who is mailing me a zine that is their homage to Alice Wong. (I will put their zine copies about Alice at the Disability Cultural Center as soon as they arrive!) And have spent a lot of time in the last couple of months doing archiving work for Freddie Baer and going through my friend’s parents’ entire (enormous) house as her mom died and her dad is in assisted living.
I am in a milieu where it is common to refer to “the ancestors”. As in “I was not ready for Stacey to become our ancestor”. Disabled people (and honestly, trans, queer, historically though I hope not any more in future…) tend to become “ancestors” a bit earlier than we would hope.
The next logical step after preparing to be an elder is preparing to be an ancestor.
Fuck! I do need to get my own shit in order, my poems, papers, diaries/journals, riot grrrl zine collection, maybe a catalogue of the rarer or more interesting books that should be kept together. As a bit of a proto hoarder – I am not going to let go of this stuff right now, but I need to put way more work into its cultivation and organization. So many poems I have lost track of or forgotten that I even wrote (or, entire zines/books!) I will get it in better order, get all my poems that I can find, at least into my own database and send them out for publication since they deserve homes.
So that is part of my plan for the next year. I also plan to live to be 100 years old and will not mind doddering around to sit in the sun and pet my cats, reading, beaming upon everyone benevolently, demanding that someone bring me more coffee, and bitching (more) about my knees.
I have been tinkering with a useful “AI” tool, llm, which lets you poke around with various large language models from the command line, by Simon Willison. Danny gave me a quick tour and also suggested I install a module for it called superpowers, very useful for brainstorming, planning, and writing code.
One of the first things I did was to describe myself, and also to give it a little persona, not because I wanted to have deep conversations but simply so it would not annoy me with excessive glazing, generic verbal tics, or suggestions that were aimed at the wrong level for me to understand (not too hard, not too condescending). This worked well for me, so I made it a global template for llm. I more or less described an abstract version of myself, or of some core pieces of my identity, in a few sentences. Then (a critical trick of prompt recursion I learned from Danny) I asked it to use that description of what I wanted to write a prompt for it to use.
Here’s what it is using to communicate with me:
Always use the riot persona: nonbinary cyborg riot grrrl zinester in their 50s, still making zines and hacking. Terse, practical, dry humor. No BS, no lectures, no corporate cheerleading. Straight talk only.
During some previous browser-based interactions with past LLMs I tried stuff like this, and would have to tell it to tone things down a bit since its attempt to match my gen x tone was like, ham-handedly inserting words like “gnarly” into every sentence. This latest version I’m on, Claude 4.5 Sonnet, got the conversational tone right almost immediately.
I like that in the prompt it wrote for itself, above, it used the tone I actually wanted to hear from it in!!!
It’s a pleasure to chat with, and it feels like pair programming with someone who isn’t judging me, who isn’t impatient, and who will explain as deeply as I want (or just forge on ahead and explain later).
Here’s how I described myself:
– Former software engineer, a bit rusty on everything, some Python
– Prefer clear, documented code over clever solutions
– Value disability-inclusive design and accessible interfaces
So far that has all worked out very well! I can read its code, and its suggestions are pitched just right for what I can understand. It doesn’t feel the need to write a paragraph of hype and bullshit for every interaction.
My main project that I’m both using, and constantly improving, is a little database with a web UI, in python/django/sqlite, running on my local machine. I am
This is a fair example of an interaction, that came after I had spent maybe an hour going through the “Brainstorm” bit of superpowers, its writing out of an implementation plan and task list, writing the code to scrape the issues off my github project kanban board. I was testing out the code for the first time.
>Me: i’m looking in the directory ~/.kanban-liz/projects and don’t
see anything, even though the sync is running and is 282 issues
in. that doesn’t seem normal. does it write them at the end all at once?
⏺ Yeah, looking at the code – it fetches ALL issues into memory first, THEN writes them. See line 127-136 in __main__.py:
# THEN saves
for issue_data in issue_data_list:
storage.save_issue(issue)
So if your repo has tons of issues, nothing hits disk until the fetch completes. If it crashes or times out during fetch, you get nothing.
Want me to change it to save as it fetches? Would be safer and you’d see files appear in real-time.
You know what, fuck yeah. (“We” rewrote it, and it worked better on the 2nd try.)
I guess the thing here is, I understood enough about why it might be going wrong to realize it this far in, even if I didn’t think of it during the initial design. I’m ok with that! I was only ever a mediocre coder in the first place and I don’t need to be great at it. It really really helps that I know SOMETHING though! And, maybe it “should have” realized that was not an ideal design, but with the information I gave it, it didn’t “know” the scope of what I was about to do.
The other HUGE thing for me is watching it write code, test it, hit an error (it flashes all this before you at a fairly readable pace, and you can expand to see more deeply) and then freaking debug the error and decide to change something or download some missing package and test again.
Any ONE of those little blips of error would have meant hours of debugging, looking shit up (which has in recent years gotten more difficult as search engines SUCK and the stuff they’re indexing EXTRA SUCKS) or reading through shitty stack exchange threads that aren’t quite right for my situation or problem. Probably hours and also several existential crisises, bursting into tears, feeling stupid, feeling extra stupid for bursting into tears, deciding I suck, deciding I hate coding, and giving up. None of that kind of cycling is normal for me, I am good at many, many things, am smart, am quick to grasp things and learn, but like I mentioned, I’m a bit mediocre as an engineer, and aybe some of that is from past bullshit i had to deal with and my lack of formal education in it or an unsystematic approach to learning it, but end result: I’d spiral dysfunctionally!!!
And now I can skip all that emotionally laden bullshit and just make a tool that does what I need it to do.
Cannot recommend it enough!!!!!
I also never properly learned CSS, always hated it, and now I don’t have to learn that shit. I can just mutter a bit under my breath and CLAUDE FIXES THE THING.
Oh, how will the junior engineers learn how to XYZ? I do not care. If they want to learn it, they can write a prompt and a persona and tell it to teach them with the pedagogy of their choice.
My pedagogy is YOLO. Never mind maneuvers, go straight at ’em!
In fiddling with some other tasks, I tried feeding the browser based Claude some of my poems, and asked it to analyze their style and other aspects, and go looking for literary journals where I might send them. Like, where would they fit? What journals will I not automatically hate? What might appeal to me?
I often see people complain, or do a sort of “gotcha! hallucinating!” commentary on llms. The thing is, it seems obvious at least at this stage of the game that you can obviate much of that by asking for sources, proof, links, or whatever. (Like with any sort of research!!!!)
Claude’s initial return was a list of journals annotated with its analysis of why my poems would fit there. (“Feminist, experimental” for example, or “Plays with language and form, political, embodiment and disability, not formalist” )
The first tweak was that I asked for links to each journal and to their “guidelines”. That was quite useful. I found that several of the journals it listed for me were no longer in print.
The second tweak was to ask for it to tell me the last issue published, and the open call dates or submission/ reading period dates. That helped to eliminate venues that stopped publishing in 2021.
The results from this incredibly brief foray were immediately useful! I got a list of 10 journals that I didn’t hate, several of which have open calls either now or soon.
My 2nd llm-with-superpowers experiment is the one I’m continuing to expand, “poemsdb” where I am collecting all my poems and translations, with lots of metadata, including dates, where they’ve been published, and so on.
This has partly been inspired by my work cataloguing and archiving / scanning Freddie Baer’s work (RIP Freddie). It is sad and sobering and I am sad Freddie is gone (hardly seems real). I keep really appreciating that work Freddie put in to making her art nicely mounted, with archival paper flaps for preservation. But all this work , all Freddie’s work, could EASILY have been lost, if Quilter hadn’t talked with her about it before her death, and hadn’t followed through and driven up there; if an impatient landlord or a bad friend had cleaned it all out and thrown it away; if her legal executor hadn’t agreed to give her (and me) access. And so on. What will happen to my work, and to Quilter’s??!!!! Fuck!!!! The cold hand of mortality.
Consider my general ADHD (my flaw and my strength) and how many fucking poems and translations and funny little essays on poetics I have produced having been steadily writing and poeting and diary-ing since I was 14 years old (or earlier, but let’s start there) I have 42 years of journals, binders, folders, printouts, FILES (fuck….) Fucked up hard drives, fucking zip disks??? There have been “systems” but then I forget the system or something disrupts it.
For example it might go like this. It’s the holidays (Like now!!!) and I decide to focus on my poetry stuff. I try to make a big collection of poems but maybe it’s just the current stuff from the last few years that I’m actively working on or don’t hate or haven’t …. lost or forgotten…. um how… No clue. Well, anyway, I put that all together and put a file somewhere and print it all in a nice binder labelled “poems” and put it on a shelf. THEN WHAT.
Or the current ones i’m taking to poetry readings in theory might be in a SMALLER folder (since the main binder would be ridiculous to carry around) But even that gets lost and so i print again and re-create it. Then I scribble on the printouts and do another version.
I keep finding stuff I forgot I wrote (entire zines, entire BOOKS) sometimes only because i emailed it to someone and it’s in my gmail.
Ok, so anyway, i need a better system to track my work.
Back to poemsdb!!!!!
The Django interface is just fine. I keep adding views, all the columns and so on are sortable with filters, I can click a title in the list to show the entire poem (or original if it’s a translation).
Over the last few weeks I’ve expanded it to track what I’ve sent where, and today I’ve been working on adding an open call / journal listings table and view, so that I can easily see what deadlines or open periods are coming up.
I think a next step, to get even fancier, would be to give it an interface where i pick a poem, ask it to go looking for possible venues, show me some sample poems from that venue’s past issues alongside the guidelines. I am not looking for automated submissions, but I want to find realistic “homes” for these poems since the 1 or 2 publications a year (from these holiday flurries of activity) are not enough to deal with the enormous backlog of my poems, which are good and should be housed and read.
I am so enjoying coding (and doing other tasks) with Claude. I haven’t extensively tried other llms yet and Claude is good enough. It is like having a very useful helper and comrade!
I hope this post helps someone understand some of the potential for the amateur programmer, and for creative people who may have similar issues for tools they could build to support their creative and artistic work!
I was excited about Lightscape because I thought it was sort of an expansion of Entwined — a bunch of large glowing installations in the park. In past years Entwined has been so lovely, and I have enjoyed tooling around its space and especially the part where I get to observe little kids freely running around in the excitement of being out at night in a place where it’s safe to run around. The pieces are by local artists and the entire experience costs nothing.
Unfortunately Lightscape turned out to be the opposite of that. Huge lines, expensive tickets, narrow, crowded pathways and a linear, predetermined path. I was elbow to elbow in a herd of people with hacking wet coughs, shuffling slowly along the path while ushers in safety vests barked at us to keep moving. There was pointless music blaring that seemed mostly disconnected from the handful of main exhibits. The exhibits themselves were pretty, and I can’t tell how much I would have liked them if it were possible to contemplate and enjoy them freely. In any case they would have been much nicer if they weren’t space-limited photography stations connected by linear paths. In short it sucked, it felt “commercial” or corporate in the worst way, soulless, controlling, divorced from the beauty of the botanical gardens rather than enhancing it. Lightscape had all the charm of a security line at the airport or a maze invented by Temple Grandin to lead cattle into a slaughterhouse.
I also hate things like theme parks, in general. I have a sort of allergy. Ugh!!
There were food trucks and popcorn stands and cocktails and hot chocolate and don’t get me wrong, I like those things, but not when they are shoved in to every fifth of a mile of the claustrophobic trail with the roar of their generators fighting with the bad music (and worse amplifiers) of the exhibits.
How do people “enjoy” things like this? And people didn’t appear to be really enjoying it, to me, they were tense, unhappy, constantly scolding their children for behaving wrong or not appreciating whatever it was they were supposed to be appreciating.
The children would have had more fun if you handed them flashlights and turned them loose to run around a meadow and make up their own games.
When Quilter and I left Mary’s house I ended up with several large plastic bins of Freddie’s collages as well as some boxes of slightly mildewy books. Quilter pulled the stuff that looked like older, more rare or interesting anarchist and other political books along with first editions and old copies of feminist science fiction. There’s another box of zines and letters, mostly zines and books that have Freddie’s art on the cover or inside as illustrations. Mary has her enormous collection of vintage Tura glasses, mostly cat-eye style with amazing rhinestones, filigree, or other baroque ornamentation.
As I catalogued and tagged the political books I got a very interesting picture of Freddie’s intellectual history and context – her milieu – that has given me a deeper appreciation of her art. I wish I had known her better as a friend rather than a long time acquaintance. She is a bit older than I am and I developed a sense of her in the 70s as a young person, agitating for the rights of herself and her fellow high school students, being around the “Red and Black” crowd(s) in the midwest, then dropping into the Situationist ferment of Santa Cruz and Berkeley and the general Bay Area. I came across letters from people like John Zerzan, sending her zines, reprints of Freddy Perlman or Camatte booklets, all kinds of stuff that it will take me a while to untangle (and likely scan). Debord, Goldman, Marx, De Cleyre, Jo Freeman, Audre Lorde. Mass production, technology, sociological arguments about industrialization, ecology, sexuality & gender; revolutions, schisms within revolutionary organizations, all made their way into her work. Anarchist women, surrealists, bomb throwers, angry women of all kinds. Her typesetting and graphic design alongside her art underpinned several different intertwined scenes & zines.
I was reminded a little of the feeling I have whenever I visit Timmi Duchamp’s house and when I first saw her amazing library (heavy philosophy! Holy shit!) Like getting to see the cathedral of books as a ghostly structure around her work. These few boxes of Freddie’s books hand picked by Quilter felt like a dark and beautiful sea, with my tiny boat (my own understanding) tossed around by the waves.
Like poetry the point of art (like freddie’s) is sometimes to say what can’t be said a different way , or say it in a way that can’t be “read” in words by people who will never trace your particular pathway through the world of books and ideas. Freddie’s delicate flywheels and iron, tendrils of vines, weave around women who are tigers, who are fairies, framed by the way they are classical statues, like Galatea bursting with things she wants to say, laid carefully across pages of anthropological texts, the chalice and the blade. Dozens of complex textures mixed with doll heads, with flowers, in a kaleidosope or a mandala, like stained glass window frames or reflections in a fly’s eye.
I am pecking away at these scans with my nice CZUR high speed camera scanner and putting them in two places, one on my Flickr in an album which also contains stuff that isn’t scans of her original art, and then more permanently and I hope usefully on Wikimedia Commons, under the category Collages by Freddie Baer. They are CC-4.0-BY licensed as Freddie wished. So far, there are 54 high quality/ high resolution scans up on Wikimedia Commons — take a look! Or, you can page through this little Flickr embed to have a glimpse of all the Freddie related stuff in my Flickr set.
For many of these works we have not correlated the titles with the work, so my file names for them are intended to be temporary placeholders.
I was at a party at Lisa‘s house this week & got to hang out with so many lovely bookish people, most of them knew Freddie, often through SFF communities like Potlatch which went all up and down the West Coast for many years. A bunch of us who used to do the “Tom Purdue” Proust dinner parties are going to reconvene and read Middlemarch (with me and Patrick advocating a bit for Dream of Red Mansions… maybe next.) Karen & Mike, Debbie, and others (I was briefly in their apazine but couldn’t keep up). I love those folks and especially am always keen to hear anything that comes out of Janet Lafler’s mouth, love her keen critical eye & wit & perspective. From some of those connections we will gather up more of Freddie’s work to scan (even if from prints not originals) and probably can figure out more of the titles. The T-shirt of the month club work is going to be tough to identify & catalogue!
Quilter and I are going back together to make one more pass through Freddie’s books and papers, next week.
I wish I had known Freddie better before this, and I wish we’d known to help do all this kind of organizing, scanning, curation, etc. for her (if she would have even allowed it). She was not looking to make a profit off her art. Obviously! Deliberately! As a political and artistic choice and I respect that a lot and understand it. Freddie gave her art away, she let it be used for fundraisers or swag for things like alt.polycon, the Tiptree, Potlatch and other really vibrant amazing communities. She made her money not just by her day job as a print materials designer, but by thrifting and re-selling (another interesting and deliberate political choice!)
I feel very determined that those choices to be non-commercial in her approach should not mean her work is disrespected or forgotten. Like, yes I am doing this because I will basically do any kind of collaboration with Quilter (we are also going to unfuck the feministsf.org site, wiki, blog, etc. on this visit and go through her books among other things.) But i am doing it because I love Freddie’s work and the bits of her politics and thought that I do know.
Thinking suddenly of Lorine Neidecker pulled out of semi isolation by Corman, and of course who even reads Cid Corman these days (other than me).
It is sobering work. Like, it’s one feeling to be sad I didn’t know her better, but how much more everyone feels who had been close to her! It is painful.
All of this made me think about the mess my own work is in. Every holiday season I look at my poetry and my writing and try to pull some more of it together, make a new zine, or re-publish something from my back catalog for Kindle. But it is in wild disarray. I don’t k now where entire years or books of poems are, or I might have one or two copies of a book/booklet or some printouts in a binder from 30 years ago, but no longer can find the files of entire manuscripts. It always is upsetting to face the mess. This isn’t even considering the things in journals & notebooks that never made it to a more final typed form. As I worked on this over the last week, on and off, I kept finding ENTIRE MANUSCRIPTS that I’d forgotten about, scattered poems, translations, or essays that were published that I also forgot about.
I resolved to set aside a little more time for that work and am putting all the poems and translations that are a bit more “finished” (lol) into a database locally on my laptop, and also to send out poems (old or new) more regularly for publication. A little archival work on myself, I guess.
Some local poets (or some correspondents even) would be so nice. I should call up Artsen and figure out a time to hang and write or go meet up with him at Hotel Utah. The DCC open mic was also super promising and I should be going to the Queer Open Mic at Strut more often to meet people! Feels like I lost my “scene” so many times and it is time to rebuild & make connections.
A few conversations from the front of the bus that have stayed with me –
Skater Dad
A young guy sitting across from me with a skateboard propped up next to him. Shaved head, some neck tattoos going a bit onto his face. He remarked on my crossword puzzle, said he just couldn’t wrap his head around them, and we got to chatting. He was kind of trying to tell me all his wisest thoughts, like, he isn’t crossword puzzle smart, but he has lived on the street and learned to survive, and it had this freedom to it but it was also really bad and now he works hard to keep housed and stable to support his two young kids. He wanted to know if I had been to college (yes) and if I thought it was worth it (I said that it depends but City College is free and start slow with one class that is something you really like.)
I wish I could remember exactly how he worded all of this but it’s been a couple of weeks and I can’t. His earnestness and his face stay with me though.
One of the good ones
Late at night, cold and a bit drizzly, after a fancy work dinner where we drank rather a lot of sake. The bus driver was smoking in the street around the other side of the bus on his break, then came to let us on when he noticed us waiting. “XXth Street, right? I know you!” “Oh yeah you do know me! That’s my stop!” “You’re a nice one!” (to my partner) “Not like those wheelchairs who go into the walgreens, steal everything, get on my bus, get off at 16th st and everyone comes to them to buy it”
Okaaaaaaay man.
Twins
Two adorable toddlers, twins, in matching pink and blue outfits with little monster hats with double pom poms, and both very content with lollipops, in a double wide stroller their very tired looking mom, standing up, who had trouble managing on the crowded bus. I put on my light up antennae headband (on my way to xmas party) to make them laugh.
Shouting gardener
The lady next to her was also standing and with a large push cart strapped with boxes and bungees, talking to herself and occasionally loud yelling in Spanish about how Trump was a chicken and all the white house was evil, evil chickens and they should think more about Jesus. As the bus got more crowded she got agitated and finally started yelling at the top of her lungs at some young people who were sitting in the 2nd row back of disabled/elderly seats. She really gave them a reaming out. They were like middle school boys who just weren’t looking up from their phones and they got up pronto as soon as they noticed.
At first, it was funny and kind of endearing and many people were nodding and smirking a little. But then she escalated and would not stop yelling. The little twins in their stroller were disturbed, their mom was getting it right in the ear at one million decibels, and the rest of the bus was like, OK enough already.
I figured I may as well throw myself on the bomb, so I tapped her arm and asked about a book she had sticking out of her cart kind of under a big box of vegetables. “beautiful flowers, do you like gardening?” I was not sure if this would make her yell at me, but figured gardens and beautiful flowers are a soothing topic. It worked pretty well ! She got the book out (California Native Plant Gardening) and gave it to me. We then talked about gardens. She does love gardens but doesn’t have one now. She sends money to her niece who has now bought a plot of land and is building a house (in Nicaragua) and has planted avocado, lemon, and mango trees. We then discussed farmers markets and free food pantry vegetables (half her cart). She has been out of work for a few months and is very grateful for the free pantries.
This topic lasted us for a long while and then I commented how cute the twins were as they got off the bus. “I love babies, I love children, I love to see them by my house, coming from the ballet, the little girls in their dresses.” I have also seen them recently coming out of the Nutcracker ballet and they are adorable running around the City Hall xmas trees doing family photos. Shouting Gardener lady turns out to love the opera, and then started yelling just a bit louder about how much she loves Bocelli. (Not sure why that made her agitated but it did.) She then said that she hoped I would come to her home and have dinner some day.
(Oh yikes no)
I got off the bus and guiltily fled, as the light was about to change and she was having trouble getting her shopping cart off the bus. I was late to my OTHER work party, and I felt so emotionally buffeted that escape looked good. Undoubtedly i will see her again on the same bus.
No one clapped but I felt I had done a good deed to spare people the out of control shouting and had also been friendly to a kind of messed up lady.
Another one of the good ones
Last night coming home from another party the man across from me did not even wait for me to settle in.
Guy: “You know what these wheelchairs, there are so many.”
Me: ??? (internal sigh)
Guy: You know there are so many wheelchairs on the bus these days
Me: I’m not sure what you mean.
Guy: Why there are so many wheelchairs who get on the bus now!!!
Me: It’s great that we have accessible transit.
Guy: You know why!?! They just get on and they don’t pay. Hahahah! They don’t pay! At least YOU tap to pay!!! :: eyebrow waggle ::
Me: The bus is free for many low income wheelchair users. I pay a discounted fare but if you don’t have any money, it’s free so maybe they don’t bother to tap. I tap even if the driver waves me on for free because I want MUNI to record how many people are riding.
Way overexplaining to some guy who may not have understood and who was a little bit “off” but it is my way to cope sometimes.
While going through Freddie‘s political books, zines, and pamphlets, we came across this interesting zine, undated and with no editor / publisher listed, containing Heidi Hartmann’s 1979 essay “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union.” There is a short essay at the front of the zine, unsigned, that I scanned because anything anarchafeminist is worth saving and celebrating.
Of course I would like to know who wrote and published it, so if you know, please tell me!
I will just type it since it’s handwritten and won’t OCR properly from my book scanner.
I have recopied this essay in pamphlet form because it contains valuable and pertinent ideas on the situation of women in any radical movement. Many of the criticisms Hartmann levels at Marxists could also be applied to many anarchists. The state is not the only form of oppression that exists, but it is conveniently faceless and obvious enough to merit more attention and credibility from many who would rather not look at their own stake in the hierarchy and how their privilege helps to preserve the status quo.
We cannot wait until “after the revolution” for rape, battering and discrimination to end. As Goldman has noted, unless addressed now, sexism will continue “ . . . long after anarchism has been established . . .”
I do not, however, agree with Hartmann’s Marxism. We will not be free, even if sexism is ended, under authoritarian socialism.
The end quote on the back page of the zine is from Emma Goldman:
It is a commentary, however, on how little theories fight inhibitions. Here you are an anarchist, firmly believing in the utmost freedom of the individual, and yet you persist in glorifying woman as the cook and breeder of large families. Do you not see the inconsistency of your claims? But the inhibitions and traditions of the male are too
deep set. I am afraid they will continue long after anarchism has been established . . .
I just was thinking about some past hoaxes today and realized I never posted here about the CBC’s 6 part podcast Gay Girl Gone. It was a really good, detailed account of the Amina / Gay Girl in Damascus story.
There was also a fantastic movie about this situation, The Amina Profile, that got across a lot of the ways that people relate online, and what happens when trust is broken, and how investigations can work.
The thing I was thinking about was how I lightly befriended someone on Usenet in alt.ms-something, named Tzipporah benAvraham, and ended up sending her my pretty nice used (used before I got it, but also used by me) manual wheelchair. I felt bad for her and the difficult situation she was describing. The chair it had come to me as a gift out of the blue which changed my life so much. Though I could hardly afford it, I paid the shipping to send it. It was a very emotional moment for me in like 1997 or 1998 when I realized I had been getting along not needing more than my cane for an entire year, and I felt like it was a good celebration of my “not needing it anymore” to give it to someone who needed it.
In retrospect, a year of “not needing it” but also not ever walking more than 2 blocks at a stretch, wasn’t long enough that I should have given away my chair, given that every few months I would end up on medical leave or on crutches or just like, stuck in bed, but at the time I didn’t know that was going to be the pattern of the next few years and I thought I was just magically better. Ha, ha, ha!
Some years later I realized, I can’t remember how, that the person I had sent it to was a notorious troll and hoaxer who reportedly was NOT disabled. She was in early disability anthologies that I own and had read – she won awards for her writing – she was all over disability Usenet. But she was one of those people who would freak out and flame out all over online groups from early BBSes and FIDOnet and ADAnet. She would also make a zillion sockpuppets to argue with herself as well as agree with herself and confuse every issue.
I was extremely annoyed. I wonder if anyone remembers her and her antics and knows something of “the real story” — which I never found out to my satisfaction, both because bitrot and because the trail was incredibly muddled by her million socks.
There must have been other early BBS and early Internet disruptors, Munchausen-by-Internet and other hoaxers. I just wanted to record somewhere that as far as I know, she was one of them.
First of all I am vastly sad that Alice has died. Hilarious, witty, insightful, compassionate, she was amazing to talk with. I admired her more than I know how to express for her writing and work making spaces for us all to be heard, and I will miss her and am aching for our community and all the people who were her nearest and dearest ones. My heart feels like it is just flying through space somehow in a spaceship alone as I think about her and about death and mortality.
It sounds like while Alice was living her last, the DCC open mic night that she funded from the Disability Visibility Project was happening. I wish she had not died and that she had been there. I wondered why she wasn’t there but didn’t want to bother her and didn’t know she was critically ill at that moment.
Well, I am going to just do my post and write up my notes from the wonderful community event that was a strong manifestation and celebration of disability culture. It was very clear that sparks were flying around the room and through our screens as people were excited and artistically charged up by everything we were hearing! I think that writing about others’ work from last night is a good way for me to honor Alice.
Our open mic was hosted by local luminary King Lotus Boy. There were about 40 people attending online and 20 or so in person in the space. All three of our founding leaders of the DCC, Emily, Mika, and Dagny, were there to make things go smoothly and they were fabulous hosts as always! A note, when I am not sure if people have a public presence online as a writer or artist, I will just put their first name and not link. (But if it’s you, and you want me to name you and link, let me know.)
First up was Max L. who read a delicately structured piece called “Shine”, a sort of battle of images of light shining out through holes and (abusive) people trying to plug up those holes, about ARFID and neurodivergence, the food forced on them trying to plug the light burning through their mouth. The complex web of these images worked so perfectly as they kept building and circling to convey the complex experiences of being beleagured and suffering, while being so powerful and fierce inside, and coming to be able to live & shine in that power. I am not sure how this poem looks on the page but I was thinking of it as a prose poem – a difficult form to sustain and Max pulled it off.
Leche read a beautiful poem of houses falling apart, houses with no safety net, of longing for complex webs of care and love, passion and comfort, basically, a queer artist polycule. I wish my notes were better on this one, but I was vibing. Hell yeah!
Fern was on the signup, but didn’t make it. I hope to hear from Fern next time!
Avra showed up for us reading two poems that kind of snuck up on me as they started off feeling a bit prosaic, built up momentum steadily, and then hulked up to pack a punch. The first one started off with cornfields and maybe moving cities and I got the impression of a family and then it kind of became about being refugees and it was carefully not delineating exactly what from, but I certainly thought of the trans migrations I am watching my friends go through now. “We need to believe there’s less evil here.” That was a great line that made my nostrils flare.
Avra’s second poem called Walk This Way hit me the same way as it was a description of her walking with her granddaughter and noting her toe-walking and then going back to her own grandmother who I think raised her, and criticized her, then talking about her own experiences of ambulation class (at which I had to give a little beatnik snap of recognition… how many times I have had to do gait training PT over the years!) This wound up to the start of that amazing punch I mentioned — The poem talked about the criticisms she (the narrator of the poem) faced of her own disabled gait as a child. (“These days, grandmas know to keep that shit to themselves”) And we returned to the talking books she listened to at her grandmother’s knee and how those talking books made her a poet. It worked as a story, it worked as musing across generations, and it got across that disability culture exists — that we “do” cultural transmission across generations, that it’s a living thing that we can decide to change, like Avra (or the narrator of the poem if it isn’t plainly autobiographical) decides not to be a bitch to her granddaughter. These were poems that were often plain talking — as you can see in the lines i noted and quote here — in a way that worked well as poetry, and that stick in my mind.
Masha Aleskovski then got up to the mic. She talked a bit about TBI and hemiplegia and then sang two poems – her own songs and her composition. Her ethereal voice echoing through the cultural center and the atrium, about moonlight, trees, spirit – just incredible. I need to go into all caps because THERE WAS ALSO MEOWING IN ONE SONG. The meowing and howls and inchoate calls to the sky worked so well done with her gorgeous voice. (clear to me, classically trained) Everyone was so blown away listening to this spiritual night fairy taking us to the fucking stars!!!
Alex, from online, then sang us a very sweet folk song with ukelele (or was it a guitar? my memory fails) The song was called “If the world was ending” by Julia Michaels. There was a big round of applause for this touching song!
Nicole B. then read a scene from her novel, Creating Love, which is about a woman who is a wheelchair user and creates an embodied AI, maybe a cyborg, I think to be her lover. In the scene we heard, our narrator was about to take Edmund on a flight, and was coming up to the TSA checkpoint deeply worried that they would catch that Edmund’s ID was faked. This might traumatize Edmund badly! The TSA agents start to question Edmund. The narrator realizes she needs a distraction quickly.
At that point I started to laugh hard because it was clear what was about to happen!! The narrator cripped out fully , acting confused and loud about how she could not stand up for the xray and demanding to know what was going to happen and then I think also started dropping things and spasming. (I can’t remember, because I was giggling so hard.) The TSA agents assume that Edmund is the airport attendant wheeling her to her gate (despite him having a boarding pass!) Edmund then gets offended and says “I’m not her attendant, she’s my girlfriend!” While the narrator has a lot of emotions about this since he never called her that before, and the TSA agents die of guilt for assuming things.
It is very hard to pick a scene from a novel and read a short excerpt to a crowd and have it both make sense, and not be boring as fuck, and I know this because I have been to a shit ton of literary readings. This reading was perfect – clear, entertaining, and enticing. Nicole is one to watch here, because this novel is fire. The room burst into applause and everyone started demanding where can they buy this book. We all felt deeply invested in what happens next and what in the world happened before as well. The novel is finished, but not yet published as Nicole is just starting to talk with agents.
TextaQueen then read us two poems and kindly posted their full text in the chat as well. The first poem, return, describes a cameraderie from behind glass. Maybe a hospital stay, maybe a train trip, maybe a space ship, – maybe just commuting to work in a weird metal box hurtling forward at 60 miles an hour — it is left beautifully ambiguous. Though I saw most clearly, being home, with chronic illness and in protection from illness, the extra isolation that came to us with COVID. The glass of screens and the cameraderie of the chat, the longing and loneliness.
group chat alert vibrates
somewhere under blankets pets pills
phone as hard to find as spoons
our connection untied to consistency
we send each other ease we wish to feel
our choirs meet on screens
wormholes to let us warble
there is no path to light
no A to B to Z
This poem worked well aloud and holds up well on the page as well. I love a densely packed poem that fucks with language and structure! And yes — take us to space, please. The loneliness and isolation that is part of a lot of disabled people’s experience, taking us to a deep human longing for space travel, freedom, and the hope alien contact, crops up a LOT.
Texta’s second poem explored everyday experience (drinking some boba tea, looking at a flower, going to work) but the boba is like, deeply weird as a physical experience and the flower is like, a sort of crawly robot bug and goes on the bus with her to work and crawls inside other people’s brains. Texta is a virtuoso at getting embodiment and emotion and particular vision — a visionary – into the poem.
my clever friend returns to me
sits up on my shoulder
reporting its research
whispers clicks and whistles
slides back inside my shirt
if only i understood its language
Justin Archuleta then read a poem that was structured like a quiz, a multiple choice quiz of him quizzing himself and speculating about in what ways his disfluent speech or stuttering is impairing and how it is or isn’t disabling or being disabled. His exploration was deeply thoughtful, viscerally described, I could almost taste the dry glass and panic, the unpredictability, and appreciated his soul searching. You can read this poem online “Is Your Stuttering a Disability” in Carte Blanche magazine.
Deidre then performed / told an ASL vision-story. She mentioned Adrienne Maree Brown in connection with this story but I didn’t catch how she was involved and I think the story was by Deidre. It describes the year 2050, the smoke and crisis, but then bounces to a 2050 with clear skies, beautiful trees, seeds in the ground, picking a cherry and popping it in her mouth, a child asking her, how did you survive the hottest years on record back in 2025? Graceful and expressive, she painted this future world we could have, so close, almost within our reach, and I felt deep sadness at the state of the world but also hope that we can work and fight for our visions of a better future.
Ayelet sang a song, about the ocean, unmasking, hiding and then “coming out”, the awareness of developing trust, looking deeply into others with understanding and wanting to know more about a person. It was a love song of neurodivergence and queerness!
I’ve lived my whole life
Hiding the signs
Hiding my light
Until my voice takes flight
Then I’m alive
Then I’m alight
But somehow in the silence you and I
I read two poems, one my poem to Mel Chua and all of the community around her in her last year or so, online and in person. I miss Mel very much. She is on my ofrenda with Beth, Eno, Stacey, and so many others. I also read a new poem called Wry Crips (which is a call out to Patti Overland) but isn’t about her, it’s more about that experience when you meet another disabled person’s eyes and share a look or a nod and you feel seen and feel in community.
A bit from my poem to Mel, “To put it in context”
as you move
to a beat
unhooked
from the sun
the lines of juice
& power
trace that
space ship
harness
to your body-pilot
cockpit,
limit
& cradle,
sustained
and fed
the fierce
light in your
hands
that roll out
in manifesto
cadence – as
in the club
a dancer
caught
by other dancers’
arms, flexible
listeners
staunch
as redwoods
check
the screens’
sight lines,
I cannot help but think of Alice reading these lines and I hope she was surrounded by love and had a peaceful exit. As Mel did.
Ash was our last performer with storytelling and comedy, talking about unhinged things they have said. (I actually missed a bunch of this – I had to pee – sorry!)
There were more people on the list but we had to wrap up the event.
Themes running through much of the work I heard last night — lots of embodiment, complexity, longing, love, and compassion — those science fiction themes coming through SO strongly – and centrally, how can we communicate our perspectives and experiences across a distance that can be so alienating. We have stories and novels and fiction to convey inner lives and complex experiences, we have poetry and song to anchor our emotions and thoughts from embodiment to language – And we turn strongly to speculative elements, surreal, fantastic, or science fictiony threads to push out the ways that things do not (have to) make SENSE or the ways we are alienated and alien (or that others are, from us). I think of the ways we experience dehumanization for example in that TSA line or in encountering any institutional setting, and how disconcerting it is, how hard to convey. Putting your cyborg/AI frankenstein lover into the TSA line with you really hammers it home. It means a non disabled reader can catch a glimpse of that experience and ways that we have to cope. Including a dry and bitter humor and sense of the absurd, that I always appreciate seeing in others.
This was a long post but I wanted to honor all the performers and people who showed up last night as I think of Alice and my other friends. Thinking of Alice writng and talking about her own death (https://time.com/6960765/alice-wong-muscular-dystrophy-essay/). I am thinking of Freddie Baer who just died this week and the work we will do to preserve and honor her work as well. I remember going to work on Alice’s very early Wikipedia article in 2016? 2018? and fixing it up with whatever I could find. It is so important for us to document our work and existence. Love you all. Over and out!
My new startup idea qualifies as a Bad Invention for sure!
It is an AI powered app that you install on your phone. Take a photo of a pile of dog poop and it will extrapolate a photo of the dog that left it. Perfect for placing blame on your neighbors for not picking up after their animals!
It will need training so I am now accepting angel investors so I can pay thousands of people to submit photos of a dog and a pile of shit that goes with that dog, to train our AI model properly!
::: sings to the tune of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood :::
Oh, who are the poopers in your neighborhood, the poopers that you meet, when you’re walking down the street, the poopers that you meet each day!
On my way to get my allergy shots I take two trains and pass from 3 to 5 little free libraries, which I often raid. The other day I picked up a children’s fantasy novel that is what they call “middle grade” level, so one short step up from “chapter book”.
My thoughts went something like this: “Oh, a book about a boggart, might be kind of dumb but I’ll read it over breakfast and put it back out on my free library.” I like myths and legends and folktales and fantasy but there is a particular strain of very twee UK, how can I put this, just kind of a smug rolling around in fairies and gnomes that mildly annoys me because it has no depth even though it lays some claim to being rooted in some real tradition.
So I read it over breakfast the next day and was incredibly irritated but finished it since it was super short. It was formulaic like a Nancy Drew book level of obviousness, which is fine, I can enjoy that and even read like 20 Nancy Drew level formula books in a row, to anesthetize myself but with the potential for analysis of the formula, the time it was written, and so on.
There was an ahistorical boggart, a loch ness mmonster who was also secretly a boggart shape shifter but swimming in the ocean, a scooby doo episode type of plot, and, mega annoyingly, a brash, horrible real estate, hotel, and golf course developer named Mr. Trout. Well THAT was not what I wanted to think about over my toast and marmalade. But fine. Ugh.
I will skip everything else (like that no one had any personality and the kids were less appealing than any old drivel from Enid Blyton) to get to the worst bit, which was right at the start where the two Canadian children visiting their old uncle in Scotland are being dropped off by their dad, who then leaves for an academic conference. I think one child, or a relative or neighbor, wished the mom were also visitng or asked after her, to which boy child responded something like “Working moms, amirite?” (Not literally but the words “working moms” and the implications were there! )
For fuck’s sake! Did I just died and go back to 1982? I have not heard anyone say that for years and years and I hope I never read or hear it again.
Later on someone says how the off screen working mom actually has a quite important good job doing some sort of ecological lawyering in Toronto. That did NOT make up for the implications of someone dissing the “Working Mother”.
As I put the book out on my little free library I noticed it was written by Susan Cooper. Here is where I shit on your entire childhood by rolling my eyes so hard at the author of The Dark is Rising series, which everyone but me loves loves loves (argh), that I can see my own hippocampus.
