sous l'eau. solo.

This photograph is from Toni Frissell, revolutionary WWI war photographer and epic feminist.

it about sums up what is going on at the moment. existing almost fully underwater. floating like a corpse, but breathing.

I spent my night internalizing a theoretical work entitled ‘women and the press,’ which leaves me absolutely suspicious of this entire enterprise and the way it is conducted. Always the questions: for whom? in the name of whom? With every dollar we buy into a commercial culture. With every image we process stereotypes breeding cardinal values. the vortex of self indulgence has been normalized. the world seems successfully manipulated. The rhetoric rises from the grave, with ease. we engage the ghosts.

A quote from Patricia Bradley if I may,

'The struggle for women in journalism has been the struggle to receive the same education, the same opportunities for employment and the same opportunities to rise in the ranks of men. These have been complicated by the terms of the craft imperatives to maintain the very standards that have not served to advance women in general. Thus, part of the history of women in journalism is the story of how women have accommodated identities of themselves as the price of admission.'

shit. what is the price of admission? not writing 'like a woman,' not breaching the 'women's section', the highest compliments to 'newspaperman qualities', the bottom line, the beauty myth, the stunt girls, the fourth estate, advertisements.

I am floating on it, all of it, vast & wide & full of implication. I wonder if I will drown.


--- --- ---
In all of this, though the book is long finished, Henry Miller still rivets and removes me :

‘The wallpaper with which the men of science have covered the world of reality is falling to tatters…

Are these men and women, I ask myself, or are these shadows, shadows of puppets dangled by invisible strings? They move in freedom apparently, but they have nowhere to go...

If there were a man who dared to say all that he thought of this world there would not be left him a square foot of ground to stand on. When a man appears the world bears down on him and breaks his back. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much festering humanity for man to bloom. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge quaking fear… If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces...

--- --- --- I love this man. Love him.

Did you vote today? I did. This is the way we are told our voices matter. This is civic duty. democratic participation. the impetus of change. ...right.

Being wary of the conservatives (like everyone else) forced me to strategically place my ballot this time around. What other choices are there? Luckily, the man for La Belle, Monsieur Gilles Duceppe himself, represents a party who can block out a conservative majority & just happens to be the incumbent in my riding. How's that for yah? I am non-partisian, but the circumstances are hilarious. first election in Quebec and Gilles Duceppe is on my fucking ballot. I marked an X beside his name, confident Margaret Atwood would be proud and my grandparents would not.

I wonder what the close of this day will translate into? By the end of today what will have changed, really? Will people return once again to lethargic democracy and indifference? Will we, as Canadians, collectively shrug and go back to watching the Americans figure themselves out, nose-diving towards pavement from falling towers, waiting on our hands for their actions to dictate our moves? Will we continue to entertain ourselves with SNL and feel superior electorally? we shouldn't. observation is witness to interesting times, in terms of spectacle and media at the moment. Two 'similar' neighboring countries going through their 'democratic' electoral processes under the microscope of a shaky hegemonic global existence...

I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore, really, so I will stop. There is water in my lungs and ears and eyes. The rain pours outside my window like it did on the corner of Union and Ste Catherines, where I asked myself if any of it would make a fucking difference, and people told me they didn't have any change....

we'll see.