Hello friends,
DISCLAIMER: I wrote this a few month ago but is it not interesting that now the REST of the country has entered and left the POLAR VORTEX? Now you may all know how it feels to sand your door until it gets weird and won’t close.
First of all, I would like to point out that it is so cold in Portland right now that no one can believe it and it was so cold our house actually changed shape and now the door to our mudroom won’t close and Gary had to sand it down. And I am sitting in a coffee shop wearing my coat, hat, and scarf and my fingers are so cold I am typing awkwardly. It is 17 degrees, which I know is not very cold for Iowa or the Arctic, but is extremely goddamn cold for Portland, and everything is relative. In conclusion life is crazy.
Speaking of life being crazy, I thought I’d spend some time this Lament pondering how awesome it is that Anne Rice linked to my blog from her Facebook page, and also commented on my entry about her Charles Burney book. Like all weird female nerds, I went through a HUGE Rice phase in, I would say, like eighth grade maybe. Interview with a Vampire, all the other sexy vampire books, Queen of the Damned, the Mummy, I read them all and found them thrilling. Rice, for so many women I know, was part of that cadre of secret novelists we stumbled across in various epic library browsing sessions, who began showing us a window into Actual Grownup Sex. As cartoonish as some of this stuff was, it was still EXPLICIT in a way that I think I, and a lot of women I’ve talked to about this, really hungered for at a certain age. Rice, the sequels to Clan of the Cave Bear, Forever by Judy Blume…Crucially, these books actually told you WHAT WAS GOING ON, PRECISELY, with body parts and arousal and like the actual mechanics of the acts. PLUS they involved female desire—the C of the CB books are all narrated by a woman, as is Forever—which in retrospect is obviously a huge part of why they were so compelling. I guess nowadays kids just watch internet porn, which is utterly horrifying to me but what are you gonna do.
Anyway, so I will always carry a torch for Anne Rice, big time. Plus she has that kind of ooky gothic imagination that I’m obviously really drawn to. As a kid, those vampire books really obsessed me. They maybe were my first real entry into thinking seriously about the kind of supernatural themes and issues that continue to interest me and that I literally am like writing a book about right now. Well, them plus Stephen King, who I was reading at a much earlier age. I remember just sitting and pondering immortality—the way the dudes in those books go through phases of being tormented by not being able to die was intensely interesting to me. Remember when Lestat like flies up to the sun trying to burn himself up but all he gets is a rad suntan??
ANYWAY. So to go to Anne Rice’s facebook page and see her link to my blog, and say she is delighted by my delight over her Burney book, and to see all her adorable fans also being delighted, felt really awesome. A circle of delight, all of us delighted perhaps for some similar and some different reasons, but nonetheless. And I am really glad that I didn’t write anything off-handedly rude in that entry! Would have been very easy to make a vampire sex joke, and I’m glad I did not, for when you get down to brass tacks, I totally love Anne Rice. Plus, she is a cool interesting weirdo herself! Did you know she publicly announced that she is no longer Christian?
“Today I quit being a Christian…. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.” And later: “My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn’t understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.”
Tight!!!
One thing I did want to point out is how interesting it is that all the commenters on her Facebook post assume I am a man. I’ve been thinking a lot about how the default person is still a man, even today in this year 2013, and even when women LITERALLY OUTNUMBER MEN on this planet. I am forever being mistaken for a man on the internet. I assume most women who don’t foreground their gender in their various screen handles (god, is that how you say that? I am so old) also experience this. I was looking at a tumblr somebody made to document all the examples of “men are people and women are women” in the world and it’s pretty overwhelming. I was especially struck by all the iconography on signs, all around the world, in which the stick-figure human depicted is always genderless unless it is doing something involving children, in which case it’s wearing a dress. So then to note how all her commenters are calling me a “guy” and “him” and what-not was really striking, ESPECIALLY because IN THE ENTRY I refer several times to my male spouse. How heavy is that? That even the fact that “straight” is the default sexuality (which is an assumption that at least is backed up by actual numbers) isn’t enough to outweigh man being the default person! It is easier to assume an anonymous person writing on the internet (about something other than “shoes and chocolate,” as Shayla put it) is a GAY MAN than that they are a woman.
Food for thought! And now I am thinking about 30 Rock, when Kenneth is talking about the mayor of his town and then proudly emphasizes her gender, like to indicate how progressive his town was: “…..and SHE…..was a horse!”
Anyway, all this has very much inspired me to go get Cry To Heaven and read it over break. I assume I will love it. In conclusion, Anne Rice rules, the internet rules, lets try to stop assuming people are men until proven otherwise, kids shouldn’t watch porn, it is cold as ice here in Portland, and here is a new issue of Zuckerberg’s Lament.
Enjoy!