The Velvet Chamber

601 Bourbon Street

2010-10-25T07:04:00.000-07:00

Streetcar under (de)construction

Esteemed members of the academy, why would Blanche let Stanley finger fuck her in the kitchen in the middle of the day? I asked for brains. We know she's sexy. We know she's damaged. We know that story. We know how it ends. There is no surprise, no third act twist. Isn't there any way to maintain her integrity, and have her survive? At the rate she's going, in the narrative you're proposing, she'll still end up in handcuffs at the end of the day. The white coats will be triumphant. In the immortal words of someone, this isn't going to end well. And isn't that the point of all this?

I think instead she meets a tall dark stranger at 601 Bourbon Street in the French Quarter. She's out for the evening, wearing mama's pearls and kid boots that button at the ankle. Fall is sweeping into the Quarter, so she's wrapped in a white silk shawl which flutters about her face, reminds her of the moth she dreams about every night. And about how she's really only comfortable at night; candlelight or streetlight. Moonlight. But she's also thinking about Belle Reve, papa's laugh in particular, and now the rustle of leaves from the Garden District. They could be ghosts. The moon is almost full. She's amazed at her audacity. Stanley and Stella admonished her about wandering the French Quarter alone. But if she doesn't get out she will certainly go mad.

Last week they tried to set her up with Mitch, one of Stanley's poker buddies, but he was just as stupid. Stella whispered that he'd tried to kill himself last year by jumping off a bridge, but only broke his leg. Blanche laughed, and treated him kindly, even lets him win a few hands, but would not kiss him goodnight. She may not be the brightest, most stable creature in the starry firmament, but is she also not that desperate. She can wait and find someone who loves her. She needs a man of substance, educated and urbane. A man able to appreciate the finer things in life, like her--- like her mind. That's the kind of man she needs or she needs no man at all.

She is drawn into a club by the sound of a saxophone. At the bar, she says, “Whiskey with water, and a twist, if you please.” The bartender leans in, leers, “I like a lady who knows what she wants.” She replies, “How lovely for you. You must tell me all about it. But not now. Just the drink.” He sniffs, insulted. Blanche swivels around on the bar stool, and sees him. Adjacent to her. He's sipping sherry. Insouciant. A bit of a moustache. He sees her, and smiles.

Time seems to stop.

Viven Leigh as Blanche DuBois
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some notes on female ghosts

2010-10-22T19:01:00.000-07:00

The White Lady. A legend found around the world. Often a harbinger of death. These are tragic women who have suffered a trauma in life. She might be a banshee and a bitch, but she is also fragile. If you see her, if you are inclined to believe in such things, she's on a rural highway late at night, mostly in the summer, dressed in Victorian garb: the diaphanous dress, the veil, the gloves, the pearls. Is she a ruin or is she a menace?

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Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide: Women Writers and the Supernatural (review). Victorian Studies - Volume 42, Number 4, Summer 1999/2000, pp. 677-679. Indiana University Press

In the Preface to Victorian Ghost Stories by Noted Women Writers (1988), Richard Dalby asserts that women have produced more than half of the best British ghost stories. His claim remains uncontested, and in Victorian Ghosts in the Noontide, Vanessa D. Dickerson seeks to explain the attraction that writing about the supernatural held for Victorian women. She posits that, although the wanderer in Matthew Arnold's "Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse" (1855) exemplified a pervasive Victorian condition of haunted "in-betweenness" (9), women were singularly situated in a spectral indeterminacy.
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What a bitch

2010-10-21T05:16:00.000-07:00

"Symbols and narratives of feminine power are secrets kept hidden not only from men but from women as well. The literary critic rarely encounters feminine archetypes in their purely feminist form in women's texts, because gender norms are often unconsciously internalized by women authors. Many feminist critics would agree with Jung that patterns found in myths and fables reflect the psychological development of an individual. In the quest, the male hero journeys from the familiar to the unfamiliar. First he encounters his shadow, then digs deeper and confronts his anima [the dragon, the monster, Moby Dick] wrestles it, contains it and returns reborn. In the female quest, however, women who venture outside the norm become social outcasts. Strong autonomous women are often under suspicion of being witches."

--- Annis Pratt, Feminist Archetypal Theory

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The Good Dream

2010-10-20T16:53:00.000-07:00

In that small two room apartment we could smell every inch of each other's bodies; Stella's unborn child, Stanley's breathing, the things they whispered to each other at night. I thought they were both gone for the day. I thought I had the apartment to myself. I poured a whiskey and opened the windows, musicians played on the street below. I ran myself a bath. I lit a cigarette. I took off my clothes.

It was a Saturday afternoon. I might've been dancing. I might've been touching myself. I am a woman after all, and it was hard to get him out of my head. Even though he hated me. Once when we were alone, he said, “You'd be attractive if you washed your face.” So I was naked when he walked through the door.

“You're supposed to be out,” I said, but I didn't make a move to cover myself. I might've been wearing mama's pearls, I might've been wearing white kid boots, lace gloves, diamond earrings. I might've been wearing stockings. I knew I looked good in that light, late afternoon, almost golden. I avoided the morning light, most unforgiving.

"You're supposed to be out," I repeated, the ice melting in my drink, a fly buzzing against the screen window.

I suddenly remembered the moth that followed me up the stairs my first night here, three months ago. It was a sign, an omen. I didn't see it then, but it became very clear to me as I stood naked in the kitchen, Stanley barely three feet from me. I saw the dark hair that covered his arms and his hands, a pelt.

“If you were a gentleman,” I finally said, “you'd walk back out the door and give me five minutes to get decent.”

“Blanche,” he replied, “you couldn't do that in five years, never mind five minutes.”

“You want a whiskey,” I asked.

“Sure baby.”

“Come and sit down,” I said, pulling out a chair, “you're making me nervous, standing in the doorway like that.”

“No,” he replied, “I like it here.”

“Aren't you going to tell me to get dressed?”

“You are dressed, Blanche, you're dressed as I always pictured you.”

My heart twisted, ripped right in half. But I didn't stop. I don't remember trying. I brought him the whiskey, and he put his fingers up inside of me, said,

“Is this what happens in the stories you teach, weren't you a teacher, Blanche? Didn't you instruct young minds, high school, was it? I was never much good in school myself, got into fights, pissed on the bathroom walls, chased girls, but you--- you taught literature, isn't that right,” his voice was gentle, teasing, “is this what happens in those stories, Blanche,” now he was whispering, tickling my ear, “a crazy woman dances naked around her sister's kitchen, drinking whiskey at three in the afternoon," he pulled me closer, I opened my legs wider, "looking for love," he continued, "but only finding heartbreak. Isn't that who you are Blanche, isn't that your character? Is that what you teach, or is that what you are? Tell the truth, Blanche, teach me something, do you like being fucked in your sister's kitchen?”

Then he brought his hand, the one that had been inside me, up to his mouth, and sucked on his fingers one by one. He took the whiskey from me, drank it down, walked into the bedroom, and closed the door. I stripped off my jewelry, unhooked my stockings, and went into the bathroom. I lowered myself into the cool water, closed my eyes, and dreamt I was back at Belle Reve.

The dangerous woman with her dangerous body

2010-10-18T17:11:00.000-07:00

Beatified in 1909, and canonized in 1929, Joan of Arc, one of our favorite witches, was burned at the stake in the 15th century. This set the stage or should I say lit the flames for thousands of other women burned for similar crimes in the 16th and 17th century; consorting with the devil, talking to him, making love to him, and generally being his bitch. What myth or trope fed this fire? That's easy: the dangerous woman with her dangerous body, her lustrous hair, her gleaming eyes, her sexuality, her wisdom and her knowledge. Questioned and tortured by sexually frustrated monks, these women never stood a chance. What about an alternative to this all too familiar narrative: Danger+Female Sexuality = Death. What about Danger+Female Sexuality=Transcendence?
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Belle Reve

2010-10-07T20:24:00.000-07:00

Deconstructing Stella

I don't know how this woman could be my sister. I tell her, I'm to going to run your bath, but it's an excuse to get away from her. Dear God in heaven it's like she's still a debutante. She's fanning a big white moth from her face, and drinking Stanley's whiskey. She's wearing a white silk dress, matching gloves and hat, still holding tight to mama's embroidered satchel. When I close the door, and turn on the faucet, it occurs to me to just drown myself before this goes any further. I run the water a little hot out of spite. I see the look she gave him. But I'm having a baby so I have to be careful. She's not the woman she used to be, but even so, still dangerous. I splash cold water on my face.

She walks unsteadily into the bathroom, and the moth follows her. Baby, she whimpers, why do you have bugs in your house? I reach out my hand, crush it in my palm, now we don't, I say. She's close to me now and she smells like a whorehouse; beyond cheap perfume and sweat, beyond desperation. It's sour and clings to her like dust. Help unzip me, she says. I take hold of the zipper but the dress tears at the shoulder, the lace practically dissolving. Careful, she says, unfazed, it's my last good dress. Steam rises up from the water, and I turn off the tap. I leave without saying another word.

Stanley is gone, the whiskey bottle is empty. I'm alone in the kitchen. I'm so glad I got away. I'm so glad I escaped the ghosts of that house, and the nightmare of those summer nights underneath the magnolias. Mama was always up in her room, sequestered and protected by the servants, doing God knows what. And on Saturdays, young men in linen trousers lined up to drink papa's bourbon, and get close to Blanche; flowers in her hair, eyes unfocused, why yes I'd like another drink you silly goose.

Later, I'd watch her slink off towards the barn with Philip or James or the captain's son. She'd return just as the sun was coming up. I'd ask, do you know what you're doing. It's not as if she was stupid. When I got older, I just wanted to get as far away as possible. I knew it was a dying world. By then Blanche was married to a man who would soon die of mysterious complications. Mama couldn't see me off because she had a sick headache. After all, I was just Stella, not brilliant, not beautiful, not even interesting enough to be missed. I got a a job as a waitress in the French Quarter, met Stanley one night in July. I don't need the past or the future.

She is shocked by New Orleans because it is dirty, chaotic, but it is also alive. Belle Reve is dead. I don't know if she'll be able to tell the difference. I can't bring myself to care anymore. The bathroom door opens and she makes her entrance wearing only a thin ivory chemise. Her breasts seem weighted. Careful Blanche, I say, Stanley will be back at any minute. She ignores this. Sits down at the kitchen table, says, there's no point in having servants in a two room apartment. I put my hand over hers, I know Blanche.

I still would like to kill her. When you are so thoroughly engaged in destruction, you shouldn't fall apart when your work is done. I could respect her if she brought her own whiskey and said, I'm a dumb stupid whore, and I've lost everything that ever belonged to us, and now I have nothing. Instead, she walks around as if she is hallucinating. As if she is still the mythical beauty of Belle Reve, instead of a moth trapped in the bright light of a single light bulb. She puts her head down on the table. I run my fingers through her hair. I can't help it, I still love her. Just then, Stanley opens the door, puts the bottle down on the table, asks, do we have any ice?

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A ghost story

2010-10-05T06:23:00.000-07:00

Resurrection Mary, so the legend goes, was out dancing with her boyfriend. He told her she was pretty but she wasn't beautiful, he told her Mary Ellen had better breasts and Emily Rose had silkier hair. She begged him to stop, that he was hurting her feelings, but he wouldn't. She said, if you loved me, you wouldn't say such terrible things. But he laughed and told her to relax, baby, I'm just kidding around. They continued dancing; a lindy, a waltz. She loved the smell of his cologne, his dark hair and dark eyes. She liked the way he stole a kiss when no one was looking. He was her first lover, and she thought they would be together forever.

She almost forgave him until Emily Rose danced by them. He whispered something in Emily's ear, and she laughed. Mary decided that she would rather walk home alone, in the dark cold night, than spend another minute with him. While crossing the street, she was hit by a car and killed. It was the 1930's. Heartbroken, her parents buried her in a white dress and white kid shoes. But she didn't stay dead. People still see her on the same highway where she died. She's a beautiful girl, pleasant and polite. She just needs a ride. She's formally dressed and appears educated and prepossessed. Sometimes its the middle of the night, and sometimes its bright afternoon. She always asks the driver to stop at the cemetery on the same stretch of road, the same place where she refuses to stay buried. She always goes home. She's a good girl who knows what's best for her.

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Magic cauldrons

2010-10-02T19:00:00.000-07:00

Ann Bedford Ulanov, in The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, contain descriptions of women's experience that are recognizable and worth exploring such as the development of intuitive cognition, a nonlinear sense of time, and an adaptation to natural cycles. The works of Mary Esther Harding, Toni Wolff, Emma Jung and Marie Louise von Franz, all Jung's disciples, fascinate us with their descriptions of triply powerful moongoddesses, magic cauldrons, golden bowls filled with generative power, and magical feminine landscapes. Yet they also repel with their assertion that men belong to the realm of light and logic while women from primordial slime.

---Annis Pratt, Feminist Archetypal Theory

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All women are bitches

2010-09-28T17:13:00.000-07:00

"The man sitting behind me on a plane uttered, 'All women are bitches.' The earnestness with which the phrase was said to a nearby stranger startled me. After all, no one in his right mind would be talking like that...in public...in light of political correctness...surrounded by women. Nevertheless, here he was, shaking his head, raucously trying to convince his neighbor that you 'gotta to women what you know they're gonna do to you,' clearly an understanding of type and a confession of emasculation.

What startled me about this man's declaration was the unexpectedness of this comment because men just didn't talk or think that way anymore. Women as bitches were another era and certainly not part of the second wave of feminist thought current in the media...Susan Appleton Aguiar's book, The Bitch is Back: Wicked Women in Literature attests to why it is possible to have this misconception.

Aguiar observes that the 'bitch' as type, is absent from contemporary feminist literature because in the second wave feminist writers attempts to reverse these prevalent stereotypes, they homogenize their women characters. She contents that 'for all her ubiquitous presence in every other form of the media, the bitch has been noticeably absent from the feminist literary canon. Until recently.'" Think Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Fay Weldon, and Jane Smiley.

---- Donna L. Pasternak, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
MFS Modern Fiction Studies 48.3 (2002)

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So, yes, the bitch is back, in all her bitchy, nasty, slutty glory. And not a moment too soon.

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So bad, so very, very bad

2010-09-23T07:14:00.000-07:00

Hedy Lamarr as Deliah
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Hard drinkers, bad livers, and invalids

2010-09-22T04:01:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from an Interview with Joan Didion, The Art of Fiction LXXI
The Paris Review, Inc., Vol 20, No. 74

Interviewer
What are the disadvantages, if any, of being a woman writer?

Didion
When I was starting to write-- in the late '50's, early 60's-- there was a kind of ~~social tradition~~ [myth] in which male novelists could operate. Hard drinkers, bad livers. Wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts. A man who wrote novels had a role in the world, and he could play that role and do whatever he wanted behind it. A woman who wrote novels had no particular role. Women who wrote novels were quite often perceived as ~~invalid~~s [myth]. Carson McCuller, Jane Bowles. Flannery O'Connor of course. Novels by women tended to be described, even by their publishers, as sensitive...I just tended my own garden, didn't pay much attention, behaved-- I suppose-- deviously. I mean I didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing.

Photo of Jane Bowles

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Some harlot saints

2010-09-20T06:27:00.000-07:00

"A number of Egyptian or Levantine harlot saints figure in the Church's calendar alongside Mary Magdalene. Mary the Egyptian is depicted next to her as black in a window of the church of St. Merri in Paris and their iconography is sometimes very similar. Mary came to Alexandria in the hope of earning her fare in Jerusalem, where she wished to venerate the true Cross. With this end in view, she prostituted herself to sailors for seventeen years before retiring to the desert to live a life of penitence as hermit, clad in nothing but her hair and progressively blackened by the sun."

--- Ean Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin.

632 Elysian Fields

2010-09-18T19:05:00.000-07:00

I'm standing at the corner of 632 Elysian Fields. Its hot, almost tropical, and a small breeze plays at the hem of my white silk dress. A moth flutters against my face. A woman tells me, your sister is at the bowling alley, but all I need right now is a drink. I got on the bus in Virginia ten days ago, but I feel like I've been traveling for months, years. I feel like New Orleans is a dream and I'm just a ghost.

The woman nudges me and says, like I said your sister's at the bowling alley, and I say, fine, she's at the bowling alley. She says, its just around the corner, and I say thank you, but I don't move. I'm remembering the last night in his arms. I'm remembering how good he felt against my skin. I try not to remember that he took a pistol, put it in his mouth and pulled the trigger, how people whispered, he was a married man. It's impossible I could be standing here right now.

I left home on July 10th at 8:00 a.m. in the morning. I didn't go to his funeral. The bus pulled up, and I got on. The sky was overcast, the morning air was cool. I didn't sleep the night before. I kept reading his letters. Searching for clues. It wasn't my first scandal, but it was the last. I knew it even before he pulled the trigger. Blanche, you can't stay here now. But he wasn't crazy about me. He was just crazy.

I see Stella walking up the street arm in arm with Stanley. She rushes up to me, screams my name so that it echoes in the dark streets. I wrap my arms around her, my little sister, my beloved, but I see him out of the corner of my eye. He's smiling and I can already taste his mouth on mine. If I could have a drink and a bath, I might be able to survive. He grabs my suitcase and together we walk up to the tiny apartment at the back of the building. The hallways are close, and I'm sweating by the time we reach the fifth floor.

A single light bulb dangles from the ceiling. Stanley drops my suitcase and gets a beer, leans against the sink like a wrestler. I see the same craziness in his eyes. Stella makes up a cot next to the kitchen table, apparently this is where I will be sleeping. A white moth flutters against my face. I wonder if it is the same one from the street, if it has possibly followed me up the stairs, into this kitchen. As Stella runs my bath, Stanley offers me a drink. I say, yes, thank you.

Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois
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the plight of the romantic heroine

2010-09-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

Francie walked down the aisle, now strewn with rose petals, the small church now ablaze with candles, the priest in his white chasuble with gold trim. As she walked, she noticed that friends and family looked like well dressed strangers. She peered out through the netting of her veil, and swore she saw clouds drifting high up in the rafters and small angels, the size of hummingbirds, darting in and out of them. But she wasn't afraid. The music got louder, her groom turned to face her, but then he too was a stranger. Surely this was too much? Surely this was not right. She stopped, pulled back her veil, and feeling very exposed, asked, who's writing this story?

"...unlike those fantasy patterns that appeal primarily to men, female protagonists [in romance novels] do not usually recur, like James Bond, from book to book. Once a women's love story has been told, repetition would in fact undermine the entire premise of her story--- and her life, for dramatic purposes, over."

Kay Mussell, Fantasy and Reconciliation: Contemporary Formula's of Women's Romance Fiction, Greenwood Press, Connecticut and London.

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Am I Blanche DuBois?

2010-09-10T16:42:00.000-07:00

Blanche

The frothy Southern Belle doesn't get laid either. Not with Stanley. That brute. And while she's not suicidal, like Anna K, she does engage in a pas de deux with a couple of white coats. Never a good thing in mythical antebellum New Orleans. She doesn't live happily ever after. If I may be so bold, I would start by giving this character a brain. Because when Stanley starts pawing through her suitcase, looking for the paperwork for Belle Reve, the family estate--- if she had a brain, she would say instead;

Asshole. I'm going to put my cards on the table. You're hot as hell. You're like a slab of meat in a butcher's shop on a hot July afternoon. I'd like to cut you and dissect you and serve you on a platter.

Speaker Two

I'm sorry who are you?

Blanche

But I can't and I won't because you're married to my sister. So put on a t-shirt for christsakes, but make it tight. I'm older now, men don't fall at my feet except when they're drunk. I don't keep as many mirrors in the house. I know this, Stanley, I'm not stupid. I may be fatuous, but it's required by the canon. Anyway. You needn't worry your pretty little head about my family estate, because I got it covered. I will never lose Belle Reve because I traveled 60 years into the future and invested in software. Don't ask me the details about time traveling because I'm sick of telling it, but it basically involves a “man” who visits from the future. We had our quiet moments together, our intimacies. I'm not the girl you marry, everyone knows that. Not even an alien. That makes me a bitch or a witch, take your pick, also covered in the canon. I would argue that both words belong there, except their iterations are fundamentally incorrect, anyway---

---let's get back to Stanley, that brute, that monster, that beast. He's sitting on the yellow linoleum chair in the kitchen listening to everything I have to say. The sun is going down, and he's covered in a thin film of sweat. My sister is pregnant with his baby, and I'm not jealous exactly, but I never have that experience. It's a bittersweet moment when I find out. But him? Stanley? He's not going to get a penny of that money. If I had a brain, if you, esteemed members of the academy, would allow me a brain, and perhaps some imagination, I could save Belle Reve.

Speaker Two

You're not on our list of scheduled speakers.

Blanche

If you let me subvert the canon, just a tiny bit, by the time I run up against Stanley in New Orleans, I'll have a stock portfolio worth millions. I'll be like,

Stanley, if I don't get some respect from you, you won't see a dime of this money. And don't even think of throwing me down on the kitchen table, or pressing up against me when the moon is full. Or any other of your sexual shenanigans. I freely acknowledge our attraction, but put it back in your pants honey, and treat me like a lady. Because if you do, you might enjoy a prosperous retirement.

And now he gets up from the kitchen chair, clearly seeing a new woman. Maybe a little afraid of her. He goes to the fridge because its hot, because he needs a beer. I pick up a paper fan and flirt with him. He sits down again but farther away. I laugh inside because now I know I got the little boy on the run. I say, Stanley, do we have an understanding. And he looks up at me with those dark brooding eyes, weak with desire, for me, Blanche, former Queen of the South, now reduced to such ruin, and he looks up at me, and asks, Can I kiss you?

Speaker Two:

But we still don't know who you are.

Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire

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A note on post modern fairy tales

2010-09-08T07:07:00.000-07:00

"Archetypes of the genre--- the innocent heroine, the charming prince, the terrorizing witch--- offer clearly drawn gender roles. But Christina Bacchilega considers the ideological dimension of this clarity fundamental to the genre's facade and a trap for the complacent reader, 'What distinguishes the tale of magic or fairy tales as a genre [...] is its effort to conceal its work systematically---to naturalize its artifice, to make everything so clear that it works magic, no questions asked.' By relentlessly questioning, deconstructing and posing alternatives to this 'naturalized artifice', post-modern fairy tales rigorously hold these transparent stories up to the light."

---Soman Chainani, The Politics of Content Revision in Angela Carter's "Snow Child"
Marvel & Tales 17.2 (2003) 212-235
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A coda to Anna Karenina

2010-09-06T07:49:00.000-07:00

"Self conscious fiction (Atwood, Drabble, Lessing) destabilizes [screws up, turns on its head, turns it upside down] the conventions of realism because fiction that includes within itself commentary on its own narrative conventions is subversive [scary], it begins to expose the edges of the female narrative [also scary]."

---Gayle Green, Changing the Story.

"Members of the academy---- as a romantic character, a woman, I am the embodiment of all your theories and desires. I particularly enjoyed my incarnation as a late 21st century hacker Anna Karenina, Tanya X. And Vronsky as the spy she falls in love with--- nice touch. But she kills herself before they can do it. I’m willing to go along with all these little literary experiments, but I’m still not getting laid with any regularity."

----Am I Still Anna Karenina

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A season in hell

2010-09-05T11:47:00.000-07:00

"Goddesses don't come down to us in their pure ambiguous form but in static dualistic fashion. They don't serve as models for us to imitate."

--- Thelma Shinn, Worlds Within Women

If asked to deconstruct Blanche DuBois, I'd begin first with a brain. The pallid, over-sexed, over-the-hill matron is a dizzying delight to be sure, but with a brain she might end up happy, or at the very least, not dancing a pas de deux with the white coats who come and take her away at the end of the play. What trope did Tennessee Williams pluck out of the air? What myth? She's a damaged girl to be sure, affairs are alluded to, "fallen woman" hangs about her head like a halo. Was it Eurydice? Is this all she's good for after spending a season in hell?

Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire

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Am I still Anna Karenina?

2010-08-30T11:07:00.000-07:00

Speaker One

Members of the academy---- as a romantic character, a woman, I am the embodiment of all your theories and desires. I particularly enjoyed my incarnation as a late 21st century hacker Anna Karenina, Tanya X. And Vronsky as the spy she falls in love with--- nice touch. But she kills herself before they can do it. I’m willing to go along with all these little literary experiments, but I’m still not getting laid with any regularity. I’m not getting any S-E-X. And this is definitely getting to be a problem. It’s been five years now. I’d like to jump someone’s bones. Put me in a bodice ripper, let a half-wolf, half-man ravage me. Or something.

And so I’m honored this evening to have Professor Lucy Witter-Avedon, from a very prominent university in Bologna, as my first speaker this morning, and without any further ado I’d like to welcome her to the panel. As she takes her place here on the podium, once again I’d like to remind you, esteemed members of the academy, that you need to find me a narrative so I can get some action in the sack. I don’t know how I can be any clearer. Professor Avedon?

Speaker Two

You’re wearing a Balmain dress, your honey blond hair is wound in an elegant chignon revealing heavy silver earrings. You’re often photographed at Martha’s Vineyard at sunrise, Key West on New Year’s Day, Coney Island on Christmas, and variously at dive bars in Montauk. You’re a woman of a certain age and you are also a woman of the world. You’re a 21st century woman. You’re 40 years old, the 1st wave of feminism is ancient history. So if you’re going to commit adultery, it’s going to be an informed decision. Which means you have enough agency to do it on your own. This is my view. And for this, you don’t need a writer. Let me repeat. This story writes itself. It always has. Authors have always been incidental. You should know that by now.

You could be Anna Karenina again, but not a trashy mash-up. Instead of throwing yourself on the tracks and dying, Benito, a maintenance worker, rescues you at the last minute. As he pulls you to safety, his dark eyes blaze a trail through your heart. You find yourself in a supply closet off the main gate. He’s about to fuck you blind, but you don’t mind. He’s stupid, but that doesn’t bother you either. As he roughly unbuttons your silk blouse and rips off your expensive jewelry, you muse that fucking is better than dying. That would be a revelation for Anna Karenina. So you don’t fall in love, not at all. But at least you are not pulverized. Three days later, you are accidentally shot and killed. It's tragic but at least your desire is fulfilled

Speaker Three

The story has to maintain its purity. I’ve said this many times before. Otherwise what is the point? She is tragic, has always been tragic and must remain tragic, this is why she is so beautiful. So hear me out--- Anna K can finally have her orgasm just as the train is crushing her body. It can be a manual orgasm or a mechanical one. Perhaps the vibrating tracks quiver and shake as the iron beast approaches. And in this way, the story retains the same architecture. The same power.

Speaker One

The point is to get laid and stay alive. But I could be that girl who is photographed at sunrise on Martha’s Vineyard. Why not? The image is beautiful, yet it hides my inner turmoil. I’m on the beach by a bit of driftwood, the sky is barely pink. Why am I alone at such an early hour? Or am I alone? It’s the moment that everything is crashing down around me. The night before, my husband found out about my affair. We’d just finished dinner at a small but exclusive club in Montauk. I had a bowl of lobster bisque and monk fish with juniper berries, and a white rioja. The stars were out. It was the end of summer. I was wearing that Balmain dress, but my hair was loose, I liked the way it felt in the wind.

I know that when we get home there will be message for him on his Blackberry. I know it will be the end of our marriage. I know that this will also disgrace his family. But I do nothing to stop this from happening. I’m supposed to want to kill myself, but I don’t. This where my desire differs from the canon. And maybe I’m on the beach at dawn because I getting my wits about me. Heads will roll. Shit will hit the fan. I know this. But all I want to do is call up my lover, the DA who is prosecuting my prominent husband for bank fraud. I want to fuck him for hours on the deserted moonlight beach. Because after that revivifying fuck, I want to steal my soon-to-be-ex-husband’s Porsche, sell it for parts in the city, and disappear. I’d like the story to start right here. When she disappears.
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She grabs him, and kisses him

2010-08-30T08:31:00.000-07:00

"She adorns herself with many ornaments like a despicable harlot, and takes up her position at the crossroads to seduce the sons of man. When a fool approaches her, she grabs him, kisses him, and pours him wine of dregs of viper's gall. As soon as he drinks it, he goes astray after her. When she sees that he has gone astray after her from the paths of truth, she divests herself of all ornaments which she put on for the fool. Her ornaments for the seduction of the sons of man are: that her hair is long and red, and from her ears hang six ornaments, Egpytian chords and all the ornaments in the Land of the East hang from her nape...her tongue is sharp like a sword, her words are smooth like oil, her lips are red like a rose and sweetened by all the sweetness in the world...yon fool goes astray after her and drinks from the cup of wine and commits fornications with her...that fool awakens...[and] she stands before him clothed in garments of flaming fire, inspiring terror and making body and soul tremble...and she kills that fool and casts him into Gehenna."
---Zohar I 148a-b Sitre Torah
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I like when she "grabs him and kisses him." This is Lilith of course. The only Biblical woman who has any agency at all.
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St. Catherine of Alexandria

2010-08-21T09:13:00.000-07:00

"St. Catherine, another frequent companion of the Black Virgin, was for centuries one of the most popular saints in the calendar, whose fame was brought to the west by returning crusaders. A native of Alexandria in its third century apogee, royal beautiful, rich and learned, she was, according to Everyman's Book of Saints, courted by Emperor Maximian. She refused his advances and confounded a multitude of scholars assembled by him to overcome her scruples. Enraged he had her broken on the wheel, scourged and beheaded, at which milk flowed from her breasts. But while she was in prison, she was fed by a dove, and received a vision of Christ...which some say culminated in a mystical marriage."

Ean Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin

I'd like to see a modern version of this story. A god descends down from heaven and consorts with a mortal woman. Of course there are variations on this trope in Greek and Roman mythology, but none in the Judeo-Christian tradition, at least none with any panache or style.

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Salome danced

2010-08-18T10:16:00.000-07:00

"Prepare the kingdom for my dance."
---Salome

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After we'd been on the highway about an hour, it started to snow. Sammy leaned down to pick up the roach he'd dropped, and we skidded off the highway. His black Cadillac landed gently in a smooth gully, the snow drifting around us. We finished smoking the joint, then he put the car in gear, and we took off. We got to the after hours club, all five of us, around 2:00 in the morning. I was out on the dance floor in my silk flamenco skirt and pink feather boa. Two guys shimmied up to me, two strangers, who got a little aggressive, a little too close.

Alarmed, I backed away, and fell into the arms of Artie, a rock star, who invited me out to his car to snort coke. I couldn't believe he had less than a half a gram. We must've been out there a while because when I went back in, I couldn't find any of my crew. I checked the bathrooms, the parking lot, back inside, everywhere. I looked in my bag and found ten cents. The sun was starting to come up. I was 90 miles from home.

The two men from the dance floor, one short and one tall, approached me in the almost empty parking lot, sodium lights glaring and said, What's up girlie? I said, Like my whole crew forgot about me. I need a ride home. The taller one said, Which way you headed? I said, North. He pointed to a tiny car, a Carmen Ghia. Powder blue. He opened the door, Get in. So I did.

I had to sit on the short guy's lap. We hit the highway going way too fast. I was annoyed it was almost dawn, and I felt like strangling myself with my pink boa. Beneath me, the short guy was moving his hips up and down. I could feel his erection. The driver said, So you didn't want to dance with us? Is that right? No, its not right, I lied, I was with my boyfriend. The other man replied, What kind of boyfriend abandons his woman in a parking lot. I answered, Not a good one, I guess. Damn sure straight, the driver laughed, pounding the steering wheel.

He turned on the radio, Do you like this song? I was like yeah I love this song. He swerved into the far right lane and parked on the shoulder of the highway. Then he turned to me and announced, Well I'm going to ask you to prove it. Prove what, I asked. Yeah, prove it, prove that you love it, the short one laughed. I laughed, too, like I was cool, in control. The driver leaned over, his breath smelling of bourbon and maraschino cherries, whispered, You don't have a boyfriend.

I don't, I asked. Naw, he replied. And I think you just didn't want to dance with us. Yeah, the other one said, Like you were too good. The sun was out now, and hurt my eyes. I was coming down off the coke. The occasional car streaked by. I just wanted to get home. The driver continued, And if you wanna get home you're gonna have to dance in the middle of the highway, and we get to watch. I said, I could hit by a car, dude. He replied, Not if you move fast enough.

I reached over, opened the car door, and fell out into a snow bank. I ripped off my fake fur coat, and threw it at the short guy. I adjusted the straps on my silver platforms, and strode out into the middle of I-94. I screamed at the driver, Turn up the music motherfucker so I have something to dance to. He did. It was a new song, one I'd never heard before, but I loved it. I knew I wasn't dancing in the middle of a highway for two strangers. Who now looked afraid of me. I was dancing for myself. It started to snow again, and I thought that was beautiful.

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Morrigan

2010-08-16T17:42:00.000-07:00

Morrigan, the dark mother or the great queen of Celtic mythology. Appearing on the field of battle as a black crow. A shape-shifter, now a beautiful woman. Now, dark and sinister. No one would call her a virgin. No one would dress her in a gown and take her to a ball. She wouldn't wait by the fireplace for the prince. No. She would rather cut your head off in a moment of ecstasy. She plucks soldiers from the field of battle and tells them, now is your time to die. Or she is a gentle escort as you exit this world.

Image: Picasso
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Revisions in the Garden of Eden

2010-08-14T18:15:00.000-07:00

"Unlike many of his contemporaries among deities of the ancient Near East, the God of Israel shared his power with no female divinity, nor was he the divine Husband or Lover of any. He can scarcely be characterized in any but masculine epithets; king, lord, master, judge, and father. Indeed, the absence of feminine symbolism for God marks Judaism, Christianity and Islam in striking contrast to the world's other religious traditions, whether in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and Rome, or in Africa, India and North America which abound in feminine symbolism."

--- Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels.
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I am particularly intrigued with the idea of "the God of Israel" as divine husband or lover who is subordinate to a female goddess. Or at least equal. Maybe it's Lilith, Eve or even Mary. Maybe she doesn't want to rest on the 7th Day. She wants to keep going. Keep creating. They argue, they fight. She wins. In the Garden of Eden she continues to make the rules. He bows before her wisdom. I like it.
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The abyss

2010-08-11T06:49:00.000-07:00

"The concept of the archetype [in myth and fairy tale] shields us from chaos. Yet a confrontation of nothingness, an abyss, is necessary, according to Mary Daly, if we are to become truly authentic. This confrontation is the first step in creating not only an authentic self but new social order."

---Demaris Wehr, Feminst Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Revisions of Jungian Thought, ed., Estella Lauter and Carol Schreirer Rupprecht.
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Who would we be without the protective power of archetypes? If we are not secretaries, mothers, whores, virgins, gorgons, prostitutes, giggly, wiggly and otherwise adorable--- who are we? The definition begins in our narratives--- in the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories people tell about us.

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Anima, animus

2010-08-10T06:37:00.000-07:00

"Our understanding of archetypes can illuminate the way women's and men's psyche both reflect and conflict with images of women and men given to us by a patriarchal society. In Jung's theory, the anima is internalized female in man, and the animus is the internalized male in women. But Jung did not take into account that this theory is lopsided because of the differing cultural positions. Emma Jung has said that the animus can emerge [in women] as harsh criticism in a male voice, and had she gone one step further in her analysis, the author contends, it is also an accurate reflection of culture's derogatory view of women."

---Demaris S. Wehr. Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Revisions of Jungian Thought. ed., Estella Lauter and Carol Schreirer Rupprecht.

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Cinderella's Lament

2010-08-08T06:26:00.000-07:00

My name is Wanda McClure and I lived in the foothills of Eastern Kentucky; a small town miles off the interchange, mostly in the middle of nowhere. I lived in a trailer. I was 52 years old. My unemployment brought me 388.00 a week before taxes, and the rent was cheap. I did a nice little thing with matching the rugs to the linoleum of the kitchen floor, and added some ceramic figurines I bought on the home shopping network, along with a painting. I'd been out of a job for six months.

Each day I sat in front of a computer, eight hours maybe nine, sending out resumes. I used about twenty different websites. I took an online skills test which rated me as a beginner. So that got depressing. Sometimes I took my coffee out on the porch just to get a breath of fresh air. I might've lived in the middle of nowhere, but I still loved it. Even now, just thinking about the cicadas in August, makes me happy. And that makes me think about how still and quiet it would get after the first snowfall.

For about two months, I had a ritual for Friday nights that really kept me going when things were bad, and things were bad for a long time. The sun would go down, and I'd put on a emerald green blouse with silver-tone buttons, home shopping, thank you very much, and skin tight blue jeans I would never wear out in public. I got dolled up. I made sure I had a nice cold bottle of white wine. I turned off the computer, lowered the lights, and ordered a pizza.

The buzzer would ring at 8:00 p.m. on the nose.

“Hello,” I'd call out. Like I was Juliet or something. It was totally a riot.

A deep voice, “Pizza delivery.”

But of course I knew it was Henry bringing my mushroom and onion pizza. And he wasn't a kid, he was 50. It was a part-time job he'd picked up months ago when he got laid off. Something kind of sparked between us one night.

“Come on in,” I'd holler, “the door's unlocked.”

He'd be sweating because it was the middle of July. And he wasn't Prince Charming by any stretch of the imagination. He might've been a quarterback in high school, but those days he was pushing 300 pounds. So he'd stand there, his brow beaded with sweat, his gut hanging over his belt--- dusty boots, smelling like garlic, but he'd always say,

“Mrs. McClure, you look lovely this evening.”

I used to think God, that's it, isn't it? That's all a body needs. Its not complicated. Sometimes he'd rip off every button on my blouse. They flew all over the kitchen, hitting the walls, the floors, the ceiling. Of course after he left, I found every single of them, and sewed them back on for the next time. But the sheer audacity of it. It was purely animal. We did it on the kitchen counter, on the table, once on the rug (never again) and even on the john. Also the bed.

We would never say much. We were both still married. Frederick wasn't coming home anymore. I knew that. Henry's wife? She was a boozer. Beyond that I didn't know, and didn't want to know. It was just a game we played on Friday nights in the backwoods of Kentucky. But this is what gave me the strength to go on every day, sitting in front of a computer screen, five days a week, eating a cup of noodles for lunch, and ordering up cable when I ran out of money for gas.

It was a tough, mean time, and it could be humiliating. But I had my Friday nights, and that was my everything; for awhile at least. One night, he showed up fifteen minutes late, and told me he wasn't going to be delivering pizzas anymore, he'd gotten a job, his wife wasn't drinking anymore, and now we had to act like adults. This from a man who pretended to be an 18 year old virgin delivery boy. Who fought off my advances with pleas of--- Please, miss, I'm saving it for my wedding night. Quite a performance.

To say I was speechless, told to act like an adult, is an understatement. I opened the screen door, and pointed the way out. But, he came at me all sexy, and said, why you got to get all mad. We can do it one more time, for old time's sake, that's not gonna hurt anything. I said, it'll hurt a lot of things. More than you know. And I prefer a nice clean break. I'd really like you to leave. But he had to be an idiot, and try to kiss me, after I'd said no. My hand shot out, picked up a skillet and without even thinking, I hit him over the head. But I didn't kill him.

He was just bleeding and crying in my kitchen. Apologizing. I told him, if the game was over, he wasn't getting any. He agreed. I put ice over the cut, and didn't argue with him when he said the pizza's on the house. I asked him, as he was leaving, what are you going to tell your wife? You got a big cut on your forehead. He said, I'm just gonna tell her it was a bad night. And then he was out the door.

Later, when I was cleaning up, I found a 100.00 bill tucked beneath the pizza box. For some reason that was more humiliating than food stamps and unemployment. Prince Charming had paid me. I found my ultra-secret stash of sleeping pills. I counted as I swallowed them; one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight--- and that's the last thing I remember. But I didn't kill myself. When I woke up, it was morning, a radiant blue sky. Then I threw up all over my favorite blouse, which wasn't missing a single button.
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Siren song

2010-08-06T05:19:00.000-07:00

"Contemporary women novelists, aware of the effect of fictions (both literary and cultural) on themselves and their readers, also write cautionary tales, but they subvert the marriage plot. Their characters leave marriages, or refuse them altogether, they have affairs and do not drown themselves or turn on the gas, they seek identity in work, their friends, and themselves rather primarily in men."

--- Nancy A. Walker, Feminist Alternatives, Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women.

Writers can choose to avoid the "feminine ending." But that is easier said than done. It's hard to ignore the siren song of culturally ingrained myth. I want the girl to fall in love at the end of the movie. I yearn for it. At the same time, I know there's got to be something else.

The 49 Days (Orpheus and Eurydice)

2010-08-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

Where is she exactly?

Of course, there is no answer to this question. But that didn't stop me from asking it. Constantly. Obsessively. And when I didn't get an answer, all things and all people, including myself, became lopsided. Unbalanced. Like a fun house mirror. One event didn't follow another in orderly fashion. This is when a married man entered my life, and I started seeing my dead mother. Sitting in my kitchen at night. Sometimes drinking coffee.

It began three weeks after her funeral. I was in rehearsal for a play I had written. We were working in a loft on Forsythe. The first day I meant to take the D train downtown from the West Village, but somehow ended up going over the Brooklyn Bridge on the Q. At first I thought, wow, magnificent view, but then a moment later, said shit. So I was late. I finally got on the right train and walked up into the chaos of Chinatown. I thought, this is the only place on the planet where the fish for sale are still dangerous. This is how fresh they are. How alive.

But I was late, sweating a little. I pushed through the multitudes of people on Grand Street, turned south on Forsthye and rang the buzzer. Four flights up, like a ski run. And there he was. He played Dr. David Valentine, an oncologist. He was sitting with an actress with red hair. She played Our Lady of a Thousand Tumors, and lately had a starring role in a soap. The two were discussing the scene where they are locked in a passionate embrace in the morgue.

I liked the way he played it. I was glad his version of Dr. Valentine wasn't cloying. But I also saw his wedding band and thought stop. A dead mother is no excuse to be an adulteress. So I put it out of my mind, and got to work. One night, after eight hours of rehearsal, I fell asleep on the couch. The phone rang and woke me up. Hello? My mother said, hi, its me. Ma how is it that you can call me? She said I don't know. I hung up the phone and went back to sleep.

The next morning when I woke up and remembered what happened, I thought, holy shit, that really was my mother. She called me. It was unnerving. Frightening. But also kind of fun. Where was she? I didn't know. But I knew she had to be somewhere. You can't call someone if you're nowhere. Meanwhile, back at rehearsal, Dr. Valentine started to whisper, anybody ever tell you how sexy you are? And I'd say, yes, and you're married.

It got worse. The phone would ring at night, no one there. I'd walk into the kitchen, find her sitting, calmly, at the table. The lights low. Always after midnight. Around two a.m. I don't remember what she wore. Once I asked her if she had seen God, and she replied, don't be ridiculous. Other times she told me she'd been traveling down a river that wound through a forest. I told her I was rehearsing a play about her death, and she said, I know that. Once I said, this is very strange. And she didn't have an answer for that.

* * * * *

The theater was in the basement of a restaurant on 42nd Street--- owned by a man who was on a hit TV show in the 90's. On opening night, after our standing ovation, we were upstairs at the bar. Dr. Valentine sat on a stool on his second beer, and I was between his legs. I leaned in and told him my mother is haunting me. She shows up in my kitchen at night and just wants to talk. He said, she's in the Bardo. In the Eastern Tradition, it's a way station between life and death. The Tibetan Book of the Dead says we remain there for 49 days.

I was impressed, how do you know all that? He said, my mother died five years ago. That was the exact moment I knew I was going to sleep with him. His wife and his children had nothing to do with this. I wasn't going to try and steal him away. I just needed directions. He might know. I had to get real close. The director pulled me aside, whispered in my ear, you know he's married, right? I said, we're just going for a cup of coffee. She laughed. We got into a cab and drove away.

At my apartment on Bedford, he said, we should fuck in the kitchen. Right where you see your mother. I said, Yes. Good idea. I straddled him on my kitchen chair. At the witching hour. Underneath fluorescent lights. It was exhilarating. Exclamation point. And when it was over, he couldn't get out of there fast enough. The spell was broken. The wife, the children, the home in the suburbs crashed through. I felt sorry for him.

He dropped out the next day. The director was very pissed at me. But my mother stopped showing up at my apartment in the middle of the night. Initially, I was relieved. A little further down the road, I was inconsolable.

Wolfskin by Roberta Lawson

2010-07-31T10:57:00.000-07:00

1AM, and the wolf is at the door again. Such a long, long Winter. Mother is flagging. First it was chickens boiled in the pot, herbs and plump potatoes. First it was bacon sizzling on a griddle, splayed eggs and slabs of toast dripping butter. First it was family by the hearth; cosy, lazy evenings. But the Winter just went on and on, and father never returned home. Wolf's at the door. One freezing December day my youngest sister disappeared in the forest and who knew if it was screaming or the wind blowing we heard, mother, who knew? The forest is haunted, mother.

We curl in tighter in our house like a shoe, we wrap around one another and we will never be warm enough. No, we will never last out this Winter. Something dark and probing is eating mother from the inside. The wolf is rattling our windows, the wolf that looks like father. Griddled mice and dregs of whey, daren't leave the house now. Spiders on the grill in our blind, blind house. I sleep with a paring knife under my pillow and say prayers for Summer. The wolf watches my slumber, like he used to watch my sister. Paring knife under my pillow, I dream of skinning so many things...Three mice, a human arm, big bad wolf. Skin falls back like peach-fur. Is that the wind outside, screaming? Mother, mother the wolf is rattling the door-frame! I'm almost ready, though awful-skinny. (Our Mother is haunted. Mother stares only at windows, ceilings, looking for father and our stolen sister.)

The wolf is clawing through the tired door. Don't be frightened, mother! The wolf's breath pours in like carbon monoxide. Mother is shaking like a landslide, and I am lunging for my pillow. Mother, mother, I'm ready, my teeth and nails like sharpened knives, and I'll huff and I'll puff...

The whole house blows black, the colour of wolf-fur. Winter stretches wide as a spider, ready to gobble.

Roberta Lawson lives, breathes and writes in Brighton in the UK. Her writing has appeared in places such as Prick of the Spindle, Sein und Werden and Thirteen Myna Birds. She never grew out of (original) fairytales. This piece appeared in 'Disenthralled.'

Image: Isabella the She Wolf

Maybe her psyche feels more at home in the shadows

2010-07-27T17:41:00.000-07:00

In the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, much is said about his musical genius. After all he played the lyre so well he eventually brought the devil to his knees. He was a god walking among mortals. No man was happier when he wed Eurydice. No man was more heartbroken when she died. No man worked harder to bring her back to life. We know that he played so beautifully that Hades changed his mind, said, "Yes, you can have her back again." And we know that there was one condition: That Orpheus never look back until they reached earth again.

We know he looked, we know he lost her. He was a musician, a lover, a god, a singer. But who was she? Who was the woman who inspired such passion, such loyalty. Was she beautiful, was she a seer, a priestess. What were her gifts? What is the story of her loss? When her journey to the underworld begins, what is she thinking? When Orpheus convinces Hades, is she happy? Does she in fact even want to return to the land of the living? Maybe she likes it better in hell. Maybe its cooler, maybe she can think better. Maybe her psyche feels more at home in the shadows.

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Aphrodite in Ruins

2010-07-25T07:59:00.000-07:00

It's been five years since my last fuck.

He was a former pilot from the Israeli army, with blue eyes. I met him at a coffee shop on Bleecker Street. It was a Craigslist thing. Not romance. Not initially. He needed an editor for his Yale dissertation; the shifting borders between criminal justice and the Internet. But the sex was inevitable. He was six two. I was blond. I don't think we liked each other very much, but that wasn't important.

I'd spent the last ten yeas of my life as a single woman in New York City. And that is a carnival of sex and love of epic proportions. Its not recommended for the faint of heart. But I was on a mission. Other people may have bought into the stereotype that I was fragile, slutty, looking for love, looking for marriage. But that was not how I operated. I could be my own person. I could be out to have fun. I could sleep with you, go home that night, and never call you again. I'm not saying that it wasn't lonely from time to time.

He'd call me in the middle of day. Ask me if I wanted to “get a coffee.” I'd play along and say, “Sure, why not.” He'd jump on a train at NYU, and I'd meet him at my Starbucks. We'd walk back to my place. Fuck from the instant we walked in the door. And then he'd go back to his library carrel on the 5th floor. I'd edit another twenty or so pages, email it to him. Or he'd call and say, “I'm done, you want to get a drink,” which like coffee, was code for fucking, but more insistent. That was my cue to hop in a cab, and meet him in the WestVillage. But also kind of hating him and myself the whole time.

We favored the tiny little dive bars on West Fourth Street.. The one's housed in decrepit 19th century townhouses, painted blue or pink. A little neon sign, almost hidden in the shadows, then, a sharp flight of stairs leading to a lower level. Inside and it was 1955 all over again. Old school cocktail shakers, wooden bar, turquoise banquettes, and place mats with drinks like Tom Collins and the Grasshopper. We stayed at the bar. I drank vodka, but he, a bit of a pussy, drank white wine.

We loved to talk about why we shouldn't be fucking because we worked together. That his dissertation was serious business. One night at Lucky's, he said, “What if you don't do as good a job because you're pissed at me? And I said, “What if you're overly critical of my edits because you're pissed at me?” Then he pulled my bar stool closer, and tried to kiss me. I pushed it back, said, “I'm serious. It's unprofessional.” He'd say, “Ok, ok. No more fucking until we're done.” That was the end of it. Until we stood on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street , and he shoved me up against a store window, and kissed me.

But sometimes, I'd meet him, and he would be all moody and sullen and not wanting to fuck for real. And I'd be very charming and flirtatious, and try to get him to smile, but I never could. And other times, we'd meet, and I'd be all moody and sullen, and not wanting to fuck for real. And he'd try the same tactics which also which also never worked. There wasn't too much I liked about him except his body and his brain, and I think he would say the same about me.

And of course I had no idea that this was going to be my last fuck for five years. I might've done things a bit differently. The last time, in particular, he was zipping up, on his way back to the library. The same daytime routine. I lay there on the bed, the white sheets draped over my body, the bright afternoon, as he talked about the particular intricacies of using real time policing methods with online crime. And as he was talking, for no apparent reason, I didn't hate him anymore. I just hated myself.

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Minerva Gets Pierced by Love by George LaCas

2010-07-23T09:20:00.000-07:00

Note: Minerva is the Roman goddess equated with the Greek goddess Athena. Loved poetry, was a virgin, often seen with an owl; her familiar and symbol of wisdom.

Her hand on the pill bottle, thought of endless sleep lulling her, Minerva one night had a change of plans, for Mr. Wright knocked on her door in the form of a potbellied perv with a Vaseline mustache. Through the open door she could see his Corvette was ruby red. She tried to see through his greasy sunglasses and waited to hear what he wanted.

“Feel like a date?” he asked her.

“Well,” she said, hiding the pill bottle behind her back. Her cat hid under the TV and watched all that transpired. “I don't see why not,” she said.

So she jumped in his car and away they went to the Adult Superstore, and to show his good intentions Mr. Wright treated Minerva to dinner and a movie. He swung into the McDonald's drive-thru and ordered two cheeseburgers while Minerva watched trailers on his sticky laptop.

Browsing arm-in-arm down the lanes of the Superstore, Minerva fell in love with Mr. Wright and he with her. She bought him a thick rubbery ring with suckers on it like something cut from an octopus. He bought her a piercing, a bright golden hoop for her hood. She thanked him with tears in her eyes. He smoothed down his mustache and smiled.

He kept his sunglasses on all through that motel-room night, as if anticipating the white-hot dawn that would pour through the curtains next morning. When morning came he was snoring, and the sunlight lay upon Minerva's buttocks in bright curves. She twisted round with new flexibility and watched her white body in the mirror. The light on her ass looked like a smile.

She wondered what her cat would do for breakfast, for she wouldn't be there to fix him Vienna sausages with jam. But as she fell asleep against her fiancée's pot belly she remembered she had left her front door open, in the haste of her flight. At some point her cat would realize he was free.

George LaCas is the author of The Legend of Jimmy Gollihue, forthcoming in July 2011, a novel that re-imagines the Odyssey from the point of view of a young Appalachian pool hustler. He is an associate member of PEN American Center, and his recent short fiction appears in Metazen. LaCas currently lives and writes in Florida.

Who is there?

2010-07-22T17:48:00.000-07:00

"The quest for female identity seems to be a soap opera, endless and never advancing, that plays the matinees of women's souls. A central question of feminist literary criticism is, who is there when a woman says, "I am?"

Nancy A. Walker, Feminist Alternatives, Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women

Morgaine

2010-07-15T06:09:00.000-07:00

Women need to name themselves and their experience, and determine their own connection to cultural myth and revision them, in the words of Thelma Shin,“as the cultural myths of patriarchy are questioned, researchers and creative writers alike begin to reread the old myths and to reexamine old and new discoveries in their efforts to uncover the ancient myth behind the surface stories.

If we do this Carol Pearson asserts, “we have the potential to step off the edge and fall into ourselves and into an alternative utopian world by moving outside of concepts of linear time and casualty into the elliptical present of infinite potentiality" (35). That is, out of the straight jacket, and into a world where storytelling and mythmaking, could fall back into the hands and voices of women as a corrective to the all encompassing paradigm of male homogeneity. Out of the straight jacket into a liminal space, where time is not linear, where women are not punished for their agency, or silenced for their sexuality.

Hecate for example becomes not an ugly old witch, but a wise woman. The story of Camelot told for centuries through King Arthur, then Marion Zimmer Bradley, tells the story through Arthur’s sister, Morgaine, in The Mists of Avalon: “Bradley has chosen to examine the internal rather the external struggles of Arthur (Shinn 35). Not only the psychology but the powerful aspects of the Goddess as well. In Zimmer’s version, a whole new element is added; the waning of a female centric ideology, a polytheistic belief system and replaced by the monotheistic, male driven, Western Christian tradition.

Here are women to emulate; Morgaine isn’t evil, instead she is a wise priestess collaborating with the Merlin and with Arthur. It is her story as much as his story, the feminine and the male principle are intact. It is dynamic and fluid. Even the island of Avalon, where the old ways are worshipped, is a liminal and evanescent place. In the hands of male authors perpetuating the male paradigm, “goddesses don’t come down to us in their pure ambiguous form, but in a static dualistic fashion.

More new mythology

2010-07-13T04:20:00.000-07:00

Female protagonists who are empowering and powerful are written by female authors, who are aware of their relationship to the tradition, who do not adhere to male myths, who do not merely reverse the terms, but create new apatriarchal spaces for their stories. It is in these stories that women can go to literature to define themselves, to find female protagonists, heroes, myths that contain archetypes that are repositories of strength for women. In these fictive worlds, a woman can engage in sexuality outside of the marriage and not be labeled as fallen, abnormal or a whore. These women possess Eros, a goddess like quality of self determination.

The new mythology

2010-07-11T16:11:00.000-07:00

In the new mythology, the female protagonist’s control of the narrative is sharp, unmistakable. She has author-ity, knowingness, and her control of the language is as finely tuned as her sense of self; they are one and the same thing. She is very aware of her agency, and one of the ways she exhibits this agency is by the precision of her narrative and her imagery; it is self consciously dense, romantic and even perhaps pornographic. It is her story, the engine of the plot rest firmly in her hands, as she takes us back to when the story originated. She then self consciously and simultaneously evokes the other versions of the story, bringing them into a sharp focus, and then revises them. She is EROS personified.

A creation myth

2010-07-08T06:44:00.000-07:00

In the beginning, in the darkness, there was the word. In the beginning, in the darkness, the word said, "light" and a blue glow appeared on the horizon. Then the word said, "Brighter light," and it got brighter, brasher, cocky. It fact it just about killed the darkness, but it didn't. Soon after, it began to rain, and an umbrella appeared on the horizon. At the same time a path came into view, and then a man and a woman walking on that path underneath the umbrella in the rain. They were naked and wet, and the word said, “This is good.”

This is very good.

The woman held the umbrella over the man's head, already in love with his black wet hair, and he in love with her lips. And since there were no other words, except “light” they kissed instead, in the rain, underneath the black umbrella. They kissed for so long that small green vines grew which quickly became young trees, swaying in the wind until a forest appeared and then a lake.

He kissed her lips, the lobes of her ears. She wound her arms around his neck, his waist. She dropped the umbrella, it skittered down the road, and a sudden gust of wind, threw it up in the air, where it became entangled in a tree branch. The sun came out, and they lay down in the green grass, the vines now caressing every part of their bodies.

Soon poppies, violently red, sprang up out of the warm earth. A turtle appeared in a mud puddle, a lizard darted between the yellow dandelions, his fingers entered her, and she sighed and said, “Love.” The first spoken word. The man thought, “This is good, this is very good.” As they lay there together, electricity was invented, and then the telephone. By then there were millions of men and women, who kissed each other every day.

There were other things, too, like science, math and money and language as well as eagles, devils, and gods. A multitude and a multiplicity of gods. And words, millions of words, Some words had more weight, more beauty, more color. But all of them told stories including the one about the man and the woman in the rain underneath a black umbrella.

Image: Tamara de Lempicka

We can use the master's tools to rebuild our house

2010-07-06T18:43:00.000-07:00

James Hillman, a myth scholar, incorporates a vision of archetypes that is more flexible, less patriarchal than Jung's. His operational understanding of the archetype is not a fixed Platonic essence, such as anima and animus, but an image. He writes,“‘by attaching archetypal to an image, we ennoble or empower the image with the wildest, richest and deepest possible significance." I would like this anthology to reveal this significance in the bad women archetypes, in transgressive and crazy women, because despite their negative connotations, they exhibit Eros which in its purest sense, is the drive for authenticity, for power, and the capacity of self actualization.

Goddesses like Brigid in Briton, Sarasvati in India and Nidaba in Sumer were credited with the invention of the alphabet and the creation of language and writing. They exhibited Eros, they re-drew the shape of the world around them. Yet, according to Annis Pratt, today “women like words have been considered symbolic objects of use in a masculine structure, linguistic tokens rather than wielders of words in our own right.” Some feminist scholars have claimed its necessary to reinvent language to get the feminine back into the world, into literature. I would disagree. In the words of Audre Lord, we can use the master's tools to rebuild our house.

What is her story?

2010-07-01T04:32:00.000-07:00

Here is the outline; the typology of one version of Beauty and the Beast. Of course, there are many others, but this is one of the earliest. Note that the girl, unlike later versions, saves herself. Jung says that folk tales are a map or a guide on the treacherous and tricky road to maturation. From this typology, what is her story?

-The wealthy bride groom is a wizard in disguise.

-Three daughters, two die at his hand

-The youngest daughter is imprisoned by the wizard.

- A key motif, and a test

-The youngest daughter, who is Innocent Incarnate, passes the test

-Miraculously, she saves her two sisters

-She frees all the slaughtered women who have come before her.

-She rolls herself in honey, then feathers, and disguised as a bird, she escapes

-The wizard dies when his castle is set on fire.

Where Mary becomes the mother of Lilith

2010-06-29T19:27:00.000-07:00

The anima, in Jungian terminology, female energy--- should not be a fixed, universal essence, but rather an image or template that is multi-layered, malleable and flexible. With this revision perhaps the one dimensional Virgin Mother of the Bible, could collapse and embody both the woman and the goddess. It might be possible to reinscribe these archetypes as feminine heroes who are both divine and human, sacred as well as profane. Lilith can merge with Eve, and the resulting story would be both modern and ancient.

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Consider the fate of Emma Bovary

2010-06-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

We are supposed to be happy when we fall in love, and to never want anything more in life. This has been the archetypal pattern created for us. The women who read romances want to be reassured in the choices they’ve made; they do not want the form subverted, they do not want to question the plot. But feminist authors do question it, and by doing so, question cultural assumptions that inform the genre.

Falling into a fantasy, whether it takes place in a tall castle in a remote and faraway land or a small Midwestern town, the set pieces of traditional romance and fantasy never vary. The protagonists stay at home, perhaps never even aware they are constrained. Women have been raised with this plot. What else is beyond it? We are taught that to transgress these boundaries leads to madness and or death. Consider the fate of Emma Bovary.

The madwoman comes down from the attic

2010-06-26T09:30:00.000-07:00

The madwoman is such a common trope in literature it is irresistible, almost compelling to revision her as operating from a base of strength as opposed to weakness--- a madwoman possessed of a consciousness that operates outside of the paradigm, one that is almost magical, sensing the past as well as the future. She is also acutely aware of how “crazy” women are perceived and uses this to her advantage.

Storytelling by Kirsty Logan

2010-06-24T08:59:00.000-07:00

'And until that day, you'll have no idea just how far into the woods you've wandered.'

The children gaze up at her as she sits back, lacing her pale fingers together. She likes to scare them, to tell them horror stories disguised as folk tales. Children lured into hillsides, mutilated hands, dancing to death in red-hot shoes.

I lurk in the corner, the black widow, nursing my youngest. My breast lolls out of my dress, swollen and crinkled as rising dough. The baby's teeth nip, but after six children I do not flinch. If he bit, I'd only realise when I saw the blood.

'Once upon a time there was an evil witch, and she had a garden filled with the most wonderful…'

She's off again, the pins in her hair catching the firelight like tiny stars. How is her hair still black? I am barely thirty and already my blonde is fading, uneven white streaks like I've been left too long on a windowsill. But hers is still black, her skin powdered white, her lips painted shiny as apples. She is pale, fragile: a china doll. My mother.

Once upon a time. I should begin like one of her stories, those silly fairy-scares that keep the children clustered around her feet until the fire burns to nothing, she tires herself into silence, and I have to round them up in the cold and the dark. When I am called the wicked witch for taking them away. My own children.

So. Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl with lips blood-red, hair ebony-black, skin snow-white. She had a child, a soft blonde angel. When the child was raised, the beautiful girl's work was done: she had fulfilled her role as a woman. Her breasts emptied, her hands softened, her insides shrivelled like dead leaves. She moved slowly, thoughtfully. There was nothing to hurry for now. She was above the dirty business of men, of sex, of children. Her body did not bleed; it did not sweat or scream or cry.

She is fragile, unreal. She is pure fantasy.

And what of her beautiful blonde baby? I am swollen and stretched and sagging. Children tug at my skirts, pull me back down, clamour for more food, more toys, more stories.

The world is painted red from scraped knees, masked by the steam from bubbling pans. I crave a white room, white as my mother's skin. I crave silence.

There is no silence by the fireside, but it's as close as I can get. Instead of a maelstrom there is only one voice, one story.

'But without the enchanted crown the prince could not find her, so…'

I watch the children from half-closed eyes. The baby has slipped from my breast; he sprawls in a warm-milk stupor on my lap. I pull my dress up, my nipples wet and rubbery against the fabric.

I should stand: there are six sets of clothes to wash, six dirty dishes to scrub, six pairs of shoes to polish. No, seven. Seven, because my mother does not. Can not. That is for me, my hands raw as a huntsman's.

I should stand, I should go and… but why should I? Why should I ruin my hands, my body? Why should I be a fattened sow leaking milk, when she gets to be the china doll, the princess?

Perhaps it's time I was the storyteller.

The next night I hold court by the fireside. My hands still ache from digging in the snow and it's hard not to stare at the door, but I am determined to enjoy this.

The children bundle around my feet, eyes wide as eggs. They clamoured briefly for their usual storyteller, but when they were promised a brand new fairy-tale they hushed.

'Once upon a time there was a girl with skin as white as snow…'

I tell a story of a jealous queen, a merciful hunter, a cruel forest. I tell of seven dwarfs, a glass coffin, a girl kissed awake by a prince. I tell them that if you can save yourself once, you can save yourself twice.

By the time I scoop them into bed, I've almost managed to convince myself.

The snow has stopped falling when I go to find her. The white layer is flawless, my bare feet barely leaving tracks. My toes numbed as soon as I stepped outside and now they are starting to burn, like a fire deep in my bones. Like red-hot shoes. I press my feet further into the packed snow, making sure it numbs my ankles too. I want to know how it felt for her.

Even now I'm hoping that the story was true. That she will have been rescued, carried to a warm cottage full of the smells of baking and shoe polish. That she will be there now, waiting for her poisoned apple.

My mother lies in the middle of the clearing. Fresh snow has fallen, covering her. All I can see is her hair, spread out like a pool of oil, still black.

Kirsty Logan writes, edits, teaches, and reviews books in Glasgow, Scotland. She wrote her undergraduate dissertation on retold fairy tales and is currently working on a collection of fairytale-inspired poetry. She is still a little bit in love with wicked witches."

For more info: http://www.kirstylogan.com.

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How to live happily ever after (or at least how to write the story)

2010-06-21T20:28:00.000-07:00

Your hero, your girl escapes the enclosure of marriage, the enclosure of the patriarchy. She has successfully negotiated the liminal spaces between false universals in fairy tales. She has teased out her own story where she walks right up to the mouth of death, and is willing to die, but also willing to be reborn, to the be author of her own story, to embrace the complexity of her sexuality by admitting both the sacred and the profane into her psyche.

She is powerful but she is not a witch. She is amplified, but she is not a whore. She is transformed but she doesn’t go crazy. She is also flawed. She has eaten from the tree of knowledge. In Jungian terms, she has completed the process of individuation. She now embraces a new archetype of femininity. She is the primary agent of her authenticity, in other words:

She lives happily ever after.

Women who rescue men (and other Russian folk tales worth reading)

2010-06-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

I received a lovely email from a fan of The Velvet Chamber, Anastasia Diatlova where she writes at length about female heroes/female warriors of Russian fairy-tales heroic epics. She says:

There is a common fairytale trope where the hero must go on a quest to rescue a fair maiden from captivity. Now, there are several Russian tales, where this trope is inverted. The maiden must rescue the prince who is being held captive.

For instance, The Feather of Finist the Fair Falcon, is a story where the main heroine not only chooses her own bridegroom and spends nights with him, but also must go on a quest to rescue him from a sorceress-queen. This story is, interestingly, very female driven. There are basically only two male characters: Finist and the girl’s father. All the other characters - the evil sisters, the helpful Baba Yagas (in this story there are three of them) and the sorceress-queen - are all women.

Another character is from heroic epics called Vasilisa Mikulishna. Her husband, Stavr, offends Prince Vladimir and is imprisoned. She dresses up as a Tatar envoy and using cunning, dexterity and physical strength rescues her husband and dupes the Prince.

A number of Russian fairytales focus on women who are either extremely powerful sorceresses, Vasilisa the Wise, or warriors, Mar’ia Morevna. I am certain that these stories and female characters are not unique to Russian folklore, but I distinctly remember, as a child, coming across them only in Russian fairytales.

What I find even more interesting is that Vladimir Prop, The Morphology of the Folk Tale, in his classification of narrative seems to have entirely overlooked these tales, even though, supposedly, his classification is based on Russian fairytales.

It is surprising, although, not completely unexpected that Vladimir Prop in this seminal work totally omits these fables. In the book, he claims a a universal typology of recurring events, themes and characters. What does it mean that he omitted the Russian fables of heroic women? For him the functionality of the princess is inextricably tied to her father. That limits the narrative reach of the princess. How can you go out and rescue your husband when you are tied to your father's apron strings?

Image: Ivan Bilibin

More thoughts on The Velvet Chamber

2010-06-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

The Velvet Chamber wants stories that reinscribe the classic texts with a sharp feminist twist. The heroine in traditional bodice rippers, fairy tales and even myth is always being saved or rejected or taken to new heights of ecstasy by her male lover.

The above are conventional paradigms; female protagonists created by men. The Velvet Chamber invites the creation of female protagonists written by women or like-minded men, free from the hegemony of patriarchal discourse, free from the male gaze.

In The Velvet Chamber, the reader will meet the image of woman, an archetypal woman, written and revisioned from a feminine perspective. Fantasy, as a genre, appeals to this process because it has irreverence and a freedom in content and structure; it has the power to render social norms obsolete, as well as permission to create new ones. Female protagonists will be free to wander across time, space, as well as gender constraints.

Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber successfully negotiates the tricky landscape around the retelling of fairy tales and avoids the obvious traps. She does not merely reverse the terms. The cumulative effect of reading The Bloody Chamber is to see the same virginal archetype, pushed beyond its restrictive forms and it into something transgressive--- a powerful, sexual being who is also fallible, malleable, flexible, capable of change. A woman who is human. The Velvet Chamber aims for the same in its stories.

Image: Ajax and Cassandra, Solomon Joseph Solomon, 1886

The Wicked Witch

2010-06-14T05:38:00.000-07:00

In the film, The Wizard of Oz , The Wicked Witch of the West, is an old crone with a long nose. Dressed in black, with a pointed hat, she is accompanied by an army of devilish flying monkeys, who wreak havoc wherever they go. Rapacious and thoroughly evil, she is, nevertheless, a force to be reckoned with--- because she is powerful.

She is a witch possessed of an indomitable will, she stops at nothing to get what she wants. In short, she is a female character who moves through her mythical landscape with agency and authority. In a traditional, patriarchal narrative, as this one, she is punished for her power; she dissolves into a puddle of water, becomes insubstantial, invisible. Clearly, she is a transgressive female character, who appears to be without an ounce of redemption

One might feel a stirring of pity as she is reduced to a puddle of nothingness, but more often than not, we are glad to see her go. Transgressive female characters, like the Wicked Witch of the West, are women who defy, who frighten, who challenge and who intimidate. They will not be silenced, they will not obey the rules. I want to be just like them when I grow up.

When we dead awaken

2010-06-12T07:28:00.000-07:00

As Adrienne Rich writes in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision, “She goes to poetry looking for her way of being in the world, she comes up against something that negates everything she is about, she meets the image of Woman in books written by men” (21). We seem to find women, or female archetypes, who are either perpetually getting into trouble like Pandora, or Cinderella, who passively awaits her destiny.

Or we find the deeply embedded archetypes in Judeo-Christian tradition, where powerful women are punished or even reviled; Lilith, Eve and Mary Magdalene. We grew up straightjacketed by these stories, their content was never questioned; it was as axiomatic, as simple and indisputable as a mathematical equation. Many of us came of age with the notion of “woman” as a flawed creature of uncontrollable desires, whose actions seemed to frequently bring doom and destruction to herself and even those around her.

However, we are allowed to be pretty, we are allowed to be objects, put upon a pedestal, and admired. We are allowed to be draped in dresses, perfumed and made-up--- or we are shorn of our sexuality like Eve, the Virgin Mother. We, women, can’t emulate Eve, We can’t define ourselves by her, she exists outside the framework of our knowable experience. Real women give birth, but the reproductive function is inseparable from our sexuality and our bodies. Yet, these are our contemporary myths, our feminine archetypes--- our essential woman; object, not subject.

The Fall of Love by Susan Tepper

2010-06-09T09:55:00.000-07:00

I found Susan Tepper and her excellent revision of Leda and the Swan on Fictionaut. I'm a new member, and have to say it is one of the best online sites for writers I've ever seen. I highly recommend it. Follow the link to learn more about her work.

THE FALL OF LOVE

Leda was named for the swan in that myth. It came to her mother while she was giving birth on acid. The entire commune watched Leda come bursting into the world. Some hippie guy, standing at her mother's head, played Blowin' in the Wind on the harmonica. A short time after, the commune had tumbled.

"What could you expect?" her mother often said over the years Leda was growing up. Her mother, May, cursing suburbia for its dull predictability, its sameness, the boredom.

May blamed the fall of love on Charles Manson. We were so happy at Fieldings Farm, she'd say, her lined blue eyes looking wistful.

Unlike her mother, Leda felt comfortable in suburbia. She liked all the little houses lined up identical except for the five different color choices. She liked when it turned pitch dark making it difficult to tell the houses apart.

Since nobody bothered locking their doors, people sometimes woke up sleeping off a drunk on the wrong sofa. Even the dogs got confused, here and there, pushing their way inside the wrong doggie-door-slot.

And that was kind of how Leda met Sam. He'd come in from Nebraska to visit his old college roommate, Charlie Mack, and didn't count correctly from the corner. Instead of counting seven houses, Sam had counted eight. Ending up in Leda's kitchen.

May had cooked some thick pea soup and they were sitting at the table, when in walked this tall guy carrying a backpack. “Heavy pack,” he said. Then, “I'm looking for Charlie Mack.”

“It could be a tune,” said May.

Sam looked puzzled taking a few steps backward.

“You came one house too many,” May explained.

He still looked confused scratching his pale chin stubble.

“The houses, they're all the same,” said Leda feeling a rush of heat in her ears. “In the dark you can't pick out the colors.”

Sam had stayed on for soup. He kept looking at Leda, then toward May as if to ask was it OK he kept looking at Leda.

That night he went to bed with both of them. First Leda. Then the swan.

Image: Leda and the Swan, 1530, Michelangelo

Strange and secret peoples

2010-06-08T11:43:00.000-07:00

The modern bride, dressed in a long white gown, is a relatively new phenomenon, popularized in the Victorian Era and contrary to the current zeitgeist, the color white symbolized joy, not purity. Off all the bridal raiment one sees today in popular culture, the veil is the oldest of these. Wedding ceremonies have taken place all through recorded history, although the word “bride” is first used in the modern context in the 9th century in England (OED). What is a woman enacting in a couture gown in a cathedral, or a cotton sundress on the beach at dawn, what is the lure and the draw of this ritual?

One of the earliest references can be found, not surprisingly in mythology. The Celtic goddess, Brigid, according to Robert Graves in his book, The White Goddess, belongs to the trinity of the triple moon goddess, who occurred through Indo European mythology. She was one of the most widely worshipped goddesses in Celtic Britain. In the triad, she represents the maiden, and is associated with healing, creativity, wisdom and childbirth--- all transformative actions.

Brigid took over from the winter goddess, the hag, and only women were allowed at her ceremonies. She is later Christianized as St. Brigit in Ireland. In the highlands, she became St. Bride, foster mother to Jesus Christ. Is it possible that her magic, and her iconography persevered and became encoded in the Fairy Bride of the Victorian Era? Folklorists believed that her cult like devotion stretched far into the Victorian Era when we first see the bride as fairy princess.

Traditionally, the fairy bride is non human or enchanted, living beneath the sea in a magical place, but is captured by a mortal man and is transformed by marriage to him. She lives her life as a mortal being, bearing children and resigned to her fate. Yet one day she finds her garment that she shed when the transformation occurred, she slips back into it and escapes back beneath the sea, becoming once again an enchanted creature. She is then a powerful creature, perhaps her antecedent is Brigid or St. Bride, a goddess in disguise, and not subject to the laws of ordinary women.

According to Carole Silver in Strange and Secret Peoples, this fairy tale rose in prominence in the Victorian Era, just as marriage laws were being revised--- at stake the power or rather powerlessness of women. Early folklorists ignored the autonomy and strength of the fairy bride and the fairy society she inhabited, they “found the subject of fairy brides married to mortal men disturbing” (94). Of course they did, that might imply the women were something more than decoration.

And since wives were still considered property, this interpretation was far too dangerous. Certainly if she is descended, at least in part from the powerful Celtic goddess, Brigid, and not an impoverished Catholic substitute, there was good reason to be concerned. Whether she was the Swan Maiden, the Fairy Bride, or the Seal Bride, she might really be functioning as an encoded, underground assertion of female power, through the ritual of the wedding.

It is at this juncture of fairy tales, myth and real life gender struggles that the story of the modern bride is born. There were certainly always a set of rituals accompanied by an announcement and subsequent wedding of a young man and a young woman. The rice and the bridal cake, for example, symbolized a wish for fertility, and all of these rituals worked to “effect real and perhaps long lasting transformation in the lives of the ritual participants” (Otnes and Pleck, 4).

Before the Victorian Era, women had simply worn their best dress on their wedding day. However, the idea of dressing up as a fairy princess, in a long white gown, worn only once on her special day, with a veil, was new--- and eagerly embraced. She became the living embodiment of ritual and magic fed by myth and popular fairy tales. But who exactly is hiding beneath that veil? And is she dangerous?

Sources:

Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.

Otnes, Cele C., and Elizabeth H. Pleck. Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2003.

Silver, Carol G. Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Why doesn't she cut off his head?

2010-06-07T07:48:00.000-07:00

Possible historical antecedents for the trope of the monster bride groom, most notably in Blue Beard.

• Gilles de Rais, affiliated with Joan of Arc, 15th Marshall of France, after driving the English out of France, retires to his estate, studies alchemy and magic, while young peasant boys begin to disappear. When at last the Duke of Brittany intervened, the remains of over fifty boys were found in his castle. De Rais was hanged and burned at the same time in 1440.

• Cunmar the Accursed, an old Breton tale, was the ruler of Brittany in the mid 6th century. The last of his wives, Triphine, heavily pregnant, enters his ancestral chapel where she is warned of her fate by blood stained ghosts of his former wives. She escapes, but he captures her and cuts off her head. Her body is found by a monk, destined to become a saint. He magically reattaches her head, and causes Cunmar’s castle to collapse down around him. Triphine delivers her child, gives it to the monk, and performs good deeds for the rest of her life. The ghost of Cunmar roams the countryside in the form of a werewolf.

What if someone told Triphine's story as an antidote to the western version where Beauty falls in love with the Beast and marries him. How crazy is that?

Illustration: Edmund Dulac

Marina Warner

2010-06-05T13:08:00.000-07:00

No book or blog or anthology on myth would be complete without the work of Marina Sarah Warner; novelist, critic and cultural historian. The excerpt from this essay was published in The Liberal, "a magazine dedicated to a renaissance in liberal politics and the liberal arts."

On Myth by Marina Warner

"WRITERS don’t make up myths; they take them over and recast them. Even Homer was telling stories that his audience already knew. If some individuals present weren’t acquainted with Odysseus’s wanderings or the Trojan War, and were listening in for the first time (as I was when a child, enthralled by the gods and goddesses in H.A. Guerber’s classic retelling), they were still aware that this was a common inheritance that belonged to everyone. Its single author – if Homer was one at all – acted as a conduit of collective knowledge, picking up the thread and telling it anew.

In an inspired essay on ‘The Translators of The Arabian Nights’, Jorge Luis Borges praises the murmuring exchanges of writers across time and cultures, and points out that the more literature talks to other literatures, and reweaves the figures in the carpet, the richer languages and expression, metaphors and stories become. Borges wasn’t a believer in anything – not even magic – but he couldn’t do without the fantastic and the mythological. He compiled a wonderfully quixotic and useful bestiary, The Book of Imaginary Beings, to include the fauna of world literature: chimeras and dragons, mermaids and the head-lolling catoblepas whose misfortune is to scorch the earth on which he tries to graze with his pestilential breath. But Borges also included some of his own inventions – The Creatures who Live in Mirrors, for example, a marvelous twist on the idea of the ghostly double."

Read the rest of this excellent essay

Image: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), Pandora.

A warning

2010-06-04T12:15:00.000-07:00

"Cultural myth has come through the mouths of priests and is therefore not trustworthy as the oral myth. Cultural myth records what happened, it is fixed, static, and freezes in a pattern which is an inflexible expression of the cultural time and place. When metaphorical surface becomes ritual, the God no longer wears a human body or speaks for itself."

--- Thelma J. Shinn, Worlds Within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature by Women

Angelique, the archetypal bride

2010-06-02T14:38:00.000-07:00

On my wedding day, I stood in a waist high field of flowers adjusting my veil, it was ivory lace, hand sewn with seed pearls so that it glistened like a constellation in the sunlight. It was early morning and already it a hot day--- I and my maids hung back underneath the shade of an ancient tree. They were dressed in long gowns of raw silk and fine linen. One of the younger girls pulled miniature strawberries off the vine, and another had taken off her slippers and dipped her feet into the nearby pond.

The tall grasses hummed with cicadas, the very air around me seemed to vibrate--- like the music of the spheres. My maid servant, Emily served mulled wine in silver cups emblazoned with my family crest and one small perfect sapphire. But I did not touch a drop. I was already light headed and ready to faint with joy. Soon the procession would begin, soon my groom and his men would meet us and we would walk together, process up the road to be married.

I knew beyond the valley of pomegranates, there were hundreds of people waiting in a clearing, a natural amphitheater, where red silk canopies and bowers filled with violets and ivy and daisies, were hung from the trees, and many casks of wine, for it was to be the finest wedding in the land. I vowed to remember the perfection of this moment for all time. Off in the distance, we heard the echo of bells ringing, then saw a cloud of dust rising up on the horizon, the men were arriving. I watched as Emily gathered together the silver cups on the tray while my maids straightened their gowns and placed sprigs of wild flowers in their hair.

They came into view, processing down the road, carrying standards, royal blue and scarlet emblazoned with the family crest, a mandala, and the inscription, Aurora Consurgens. A few feet behind them, my groom, my love, walked slowly and joyously carrying cut branches of dogwood and crocuses, the petals gently dropping down, littering the dirt road with bright spots of color. And behind him, a young child, a girl with golden blond hair, ringing two sterling bells. I stood tall while my handmaids draped me in long gold strands of gold and malachite, then a bouquet of violets wrapped in lavender ribbon.

As they men approached, the maids joined them in turn. I waited patiently for my lover to appear, and when he did, we locked eyes and I rushed out to join him. The procession and the music stopped while we linked arms. The child began ringing the bells again, quietly--- and we all began to process, men and women, but in a slower more stately rhythm, until we rounded a gentle curve in the road and entered into the valley of pomegranates, and then beyond a field of wild flowers where the tall grasses and stalks of milk weed brushed up against my gown, and then down into the amphitheater where the entire village waited for the ceremony to begin.

to be continued...

Note: This story is inspired by CG Jung's memoir. He writes about a dream he had in a near-death state:

I was Rabbi Simon ben Jochai, whose wedding in the afterlife was being celebrated. It was the mystic marriage as it appears in Cabbalistic tradition...I do not know exactly what part I played in it. At bottom it was I myself. I was the marriage...I walked up a wide valley to the end, where a gentle chain of hills began. The valley ended in a classical amphitheater. It was magnificently situated in the green landscape...All-father Zeus and Hera consummated the mystic marriage, as it is described in the Iliad.

Image: Marc Chagall

The Interpretation of Fairy Tales

2010-05-31T12:30:00.000-07:00

"We must begin by asking why in Jungian psychology we are interested in myths and fairy tales. Dr. Jung once said that it is in fairy tales that one can best study the comparative anatomy of the psyche. In myths or legends, we get at the basic patterns of the human psyche through a lot of cultural material. But in fairy tales there is much less specific cultural consciousness material, and therefore they mirror the basic patterns of the psyche more clearly."

---Marie-Louise von Franz, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales.

The Virgin Whore or Bring me the head of John the Baptist

2010-05-30T15:45:00.000-07:00

"Artists and intellectuals of the nineteenth century interpreted the Biblical story of Salome in different manners. While mid-century artists pointed to the innocence of Salome and the guilt of her mother Herodias, the fin de siècle became obsessed with the image of Salome as what Bram Dijkstra calls “the virgin whore.” The blame for John the Baptist’s decapitation shifted entirely to Salome and she became a symbol of feminine evil and bloodthirsty lust."

From The Victorian Web

Salome is also one of the three women who witnessed the resurrection of Jesus Christ in The New Testament. The Hebrew meaning of her name is Peace. It appears that this might be another example of a truncated feminine archetype; like Hecate or Medea, where as a culture we've lost her complexity and instead are left with binary oppositions, virgin/whore.

Image: Pierre Bonnaud, b. 1865

Mary of Ishtar

2010-05-30T10:10:00.000-07:00

This is the story of Mary of Ishtar--- known as the Mother of God in your book. But the woman I knew is far different from yours. I know this because I lived it. The real story is that Mary of Ishtar, known as the Mother of God, was a warrior goddess. She actively courted giving birth to a holy man, a god. She wanted this very badly. Think of the story of Leda and the Swan, but in reverse. Joseph, merely her consort, chosen for his strength and his kind heart, chosen because he was malleable, a common man, a carpenter. Chosen and then abandoned when he became superfluous. This is not to say that he wasn’t a good or gracious because he was all of these things, but he was also not very bright. Mary of Ishtar had bigger plans.

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I am Snow White: Part 6

2010-05-24T09:16:00.000-07:00

Read Part Five.

Nothing happened that night, or the next. No dark strangers, no visions, no fits. On the third day, letting down my guard, I took the girl to watch Harry look after the horses. It was a brilliant morning, the sun directly overhead. The air was fresh. First, he rode the chestnut mare with the white star on her forehead. Her coat shone like silk in the morning light. Then he rode the Duke's stallion, still ferocious, as if he might live forever--- unlike the Duke, may he rot in peace. The girl quietly watched until she turned to me and said,

"I'll not steal your lover anymore."

I smiled, almost accustomed to her strangeness, and asked, "And why is that, pray tell?"

"Mother sends word that now only the devil has use for me. I am to wait for him in the grove at midnight. And you are to do the same."

"Snow White, listen to me. That is not real. Dreams are not real. This pasture is real," I said, pointing to the two colts, prancing unsteadily in the fied, "I am real. Harry is real. These trees, this sunlight, this day is real. You are not beholden to a devil. And neither am I."

She remained stubbornly silent, and in that moment, I started to doubt my words to her, that my reassurances were hollow, that I might have to leave the castle, the title, the riches, all that I possessed. That I might have to flee in the middle of the night, with nothing but the clothes on my back, and a sackful of jewels. Esmerelda toting the silver and the china, my emerald velvet cloak spotted with mud, as we traveled from town to town. I would return back to who I was, so many years ago--- the daughter of a mother who sold me, and the grandmother who burned as witch.

Snow White ran off to ride her favorite horse, and I wandered over to the orchard, despite the girl's feverish warning. Yet I could sense nothing malovelent. Blossoms from the apple trees, scattered in the wind, rained down upon my head like snow. I could hear a nearby brook coursing over rocks, a whipporwill sang in the trees. Again, was this not real? A large brown hare poked its nose out of hedge, wriggling its pink nose. We he not real? Would he not be delicious braised in red wine? Was not that my castle to the west, hewn from granite, with stable and cemetary, chapel and orchard.

I resolved that when the girl returned to her people, and if I held onto my wealth, I would travel south to a warmer climate. I would sit by the sea in an ancient city of tall stone buildings. A city far, far away. The land of sirens, history, and golden light. This thought cheered me as the sky darkened and it began to rain. There is something to be said, perhaps a story to be written, about the lies we tell ourselves so that we may survive. Later that day, the rain still spattering against the windows, she was unsually subdued at dinner. I teased her,

"I thought you were fond of the game hens. Yet you've not touched a bite."

"--- he's here, she mumbled."

My spoon of broth mid-air, I asked, "Who?"

But she did not answer. I could see she was having another fit. But this time, I believed her. I sent her to her chambers, and made sure the servants double locked the doors, barred all the windows;

"Do not forget," I called out anxiously, "to use the iron chains for the cellar doors. And the side door off the pantry? For the tradesmen? You know it?"

They all looked at me--- a small army in their starched white garments, fear illuminating their faces, hands trembling ever so slightly, nonetheless all nodded yes.

"Good. Use two locks, not three!"

As if this could keep out the devil.

Here is my best recollection of what happened that night:

How she went crazy

2010-05-22T19:49:00.000-07:00

"Culture is male. Our literary myths are for heroes, not heroines...Hemingway spent his whole working life capitalizing on the dramatic lucidity possible to an artist who works with developed myths...But this kind of larger than life simplicity and clarity are not accessible to the woman writer unless she remains within the limits of How She Fell in Love or How She Went Crazy."

-- Joanna Russ, "What Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can't Write."

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A siren song

2010-05-16T08:20:00.000-07:00

The first known mermaid stories appeared in Assyria, ca. 1000 BC. Atargatis, the mother of Assyrian queen Semiramis, was a goddess who loved a mortal shepherd and in the process she accidentally killed him. Ashamed, she jumped into a lake to take the form of a fish, but the waters would not conceal her divine beauty. Thereafter, she took the form of a mermaid; human above the waist, fish below. In other versions of the myth, the seal wife, called a selkie, marries a mortal man but always yearns for her home in the sea. She is exiled on earth. Her husband has hidden her pelt--- but after many years, and several children, when his guard is down, she finally finds it. She wraps it around her mortal body and jumps into the sea. She leaves behind her family and descends down into the water, Queen of the Underworld, Neptune's daughter--- some say she still lures men to a watery grave, but, at least, she says, I am home again.

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Our Lady of Lava. Guest post by Donna Henes, Urban Shaman

2010-05-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

A huge proportion of the world's people are living in the vicinity of a volcano. Waiting for the second shoe to drop, as it were. Always aware of danger. Under the constant threat of fire — an uneasy truce at best. It must be like living with an abusive parent or spouse. Never knowing when they might just go off. Knowing you can't control the situation. Yet not wanting to leave because of love, loyalty, tradition, lack of support, procrastination, a thousand reasons. Pretty scary to contemplate. Conciliation might seem the only protection.

Fire, out of fear, out of deference, is always treated with utmost respect. And the deities who personify a fickle, fiery omnipotence inspire worship of particular passion, for the smallest lapse of attentive reverence could result in wretched disaster. There is clear understanding that She who grants life could also, at the slightest whim, take it away again. Better not to take any chances of incurring the flaming wrath.

Pele, the Hawaiian Volcano Goddess, is notorious for Her capricious temper. Her lusts and desires are enormous and Her sexual appetite is legendary. She is said to appear in the form of a beautiful woman right before an eruption. She likes to pick up sailors. Any rejection or imagined slight infuriates Her. So special care is taken to appease Her. One walks very carefully around Lady Pele. You don't mess with Mama Lava. You really don't want to upset Her. When She is pleased, She rewards you with life in paradise. And if She's pissed she blows her top.

Alas, there's no stay to the smoke

I must die mid the quenchless flame

Deed of the hag who snores in her sleep,

Bedded on lava plate oven-hot.

--- The Saga of Pele

The priestesses who served Pele wore robes whose hems and sleeves had been singed in a fire, and they carried digging sticks, which represented the sturdy digging stick which Pele employed to create the volcanic craters. Pigs used to be offered to Her, and the songs and dances of the hula. Today practitioners of the old religion still bring Her gifts of flowers, incense, the Ohelo berries which She loves, and, of course gin or a bottle of brandy.

The worship of Pele has been discouraged since the early Nineteenth Century when the Hawaiian Queen Kaahumanu converted to Christianity. Later, in a public display, Kapiolani, the woman chief of the Puna District, challenged Pele to punish her. She taunted the goddess by throwing rocks into the sacred crater. Her answer was an eruption of Mouna Loa. Luckily all the old lore was not lost.

Princess Ruth Keelikolani, who was sixty-three years old at the time, climbed to the edge of the threatening lava flow. She bore gifts of silk and brandy, and was, most importantly, able to offer the ancient chants of obeisance to placate Pele. The disturbances stopped the very next day, saving the town of Hilo. When the village of Kapoho was jeopardized in 1955, people offered food and tobacco to the smoking mountain with the same results. The lava stream stopped the next day before doing any damage.

Every year the National Park Service is inundated with packages containing small bits of rock and volcanic glass accompanied by a plea to the rangers to return them to their proper place — Mount Kilauea, the dwelling place and seat of power of Lady Pele. These souvenirs had been taken by hapless tourists who either became racked with guilt and foreboding, or had suffered a series of calamities which they grew to attribute to the punishing fury of Pele. One such anguished note reads, "Five years later, ten car accidents later, two unsuccessful business ventures later and twice broken heart later, I admit the place for the enclosed rock of lava is there where it belongs."

Pele's capricious counterparts, the Flaming Furies, the Volcanic Valkyries of other cultures, portray almost identical attributes, and their ceremonies, too, are similar. She is Fuji who sits on Her mountain throne, Fujiyama, on the Japanese main Island of Honshu. She is the Goddess Apo Namallari who rules Mount Pinituba in the Philippines. To the Maori people of New Zealand, She is the goddess Mahuea, She Who Keeps Fire in Her Fingertips. And to the Aztecs, She is Coatlicue, Mother of All Deities, Lady of the Lava Altar.

Her name is Hel, Hella, Holla, in Northern Europe and Scandinavia, namesake of the Icelandic volcano, Mt. Hekla and its nearby town, Hella. From Her name we also get the root words for holy, heal, hallow, hello, whole, all, halo and holly. She is associated with both the healing hearth fire and the burning fires of the underworld. A split personality writ large, like all of Her sisters — the beautiful princess and the ugly old witch. The nun and the whore. The bimbo and the brain. The damsel and the dyke. (Yike!) Two peas in the same pod. Smooth when stroked. Stormy when provoked. Siamese twin soul sisters joined at the heart.

Our Lady of Lava has been trying to get our attention lately. Trying to tell us something extremely important. She is gesticulating desperately. Her temper's shot. Her nerves are raw. Her fury is boiling over. She's furious, overwrought with exhaustion from Her urgent production of enough ash to create enough cloud cover to lower the earth's temperature enough and in enough time to counteract the coming green house effect.

Perhaps it's time to listen.

Mama Donna Henes is an internationally renowned urban shaman, eco-ceremonialist, ritual expert, spiritual counselor, award-winning author, popular speaker and workshop leader. She currently writes for the Huffington Post, Beliefnet and UPI Religion and Spirituality Forum.

Contact: cityshaman@aol.com

http://www.donnahenes.net/

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A Letter from the Editor

2010-05-13T10:41:00.000-07:00

Hello fans of The Velvet Chamber:

I've added a widget at the bottom of the blog to make it easier to follow. I realized that not everyone is on Facebook or Google Friend Connect. Let me know you're out there. In the few short months since I've launched this book project, I've been thrilled by the responses to the blog and thrilled also by the quality of the submissions, but want to hear more of your voices.

Going forward, I would also like to publish quality work from other writers on these pages. Please submit work for the blog; it doesn't mean it won't be considered for the book. On the contrary, it could actually help. Finally your comments and suggestions are welcome.

All best, LAS

Pop Culture Transgressions

2010-05-10T12:42:00.000-07:00

Special thanks to Pop Culture Transgressions for the opportunity to guest blog on their site. I wrote:

"Finally, Quentin Tarantino is a personal hero. I love his mash-up of anime, mangaka and spaghetti westerns in Kill Bill. His Bride is a mythical protagonist who doesn’t give a shit about finding her man. This bitch is out for revenge. The Velvet Chamber welcomes mash-ups, flash fiction, mangaka, as well as speculative, post-apocalyptic, classical and mythical interpretations— whatever the style or genre, we begin to see female archetypes through another lens. With a different narrative. Medea is a priestess and a murderer, but we haven’t really heard that story. Ashputtel, the original version of Cinderella, is a filthy, bloody little girl, but on Broadway, she’s a princess."

The Virgin Bride: Flash Fiction

2010-05-10T07:35:00.000-07:00

An angel in her white dress and long veil, the pearls around her alabaster neck. Her voice, almost a whisper,

"I do," she said.

But she didn’t look up at him when she said it. He should’ve known better. This is why he’s walking the streets of her hometown in the middle of the night. Too skittish for sex, so he left in frustration, she in tears. He sighs, looks up, and sees that somehow, he’s back at the church.

Of course. He’s back where he started.

He gets up, crosses the street, stands in front of the carved mahogany doors; it is a scene from the Ascension. The Blessed Mary, rising up into heaven. Already she is transformed. He is a stranger here as well. What does she want from him? His new young wife? He is just a man who fell in love with a girl. Who did the right thing; waited, sought release in the arms of high-heeled women. This is what his father told him. This is what his mother told him. So why is he here, alone, on his wedding night?

He tries the door and is surprised to find it is open. Once inside, he automatically dips his finger into the holy water and blesses himself. It’s dark, but attenuated yellow light spills onto the altar from the sacristy. He sees several wedding bouquets still up there. They are his flowers, from his wedding, and he wants one. Defiantly he walks the length of the church, towards the altar. But what is that? Out of the corner of his eye, he sees movement, looks around, slightly panicked.

No, he reassures himself, I am alone. I am the only person awake in this godforsaken town. He continues walking up the aisle, his heels striking the marble floor, echoing. He can smell the wooden benches, the incense, the religion. He stops to pick up a stray bloom on a pew, stands up again, and sees her. Instead of a statue, the Virgin Mary, it is now a beautiful woman. She is smiling at him.

He freezes. He cannot move a muscle. But its not fear that paralyzes him, it is desire. She walks as if she has just stepped out of a cloud, tall and proud. She pulls a blossom from around her waist and affixes it in her hair. She has red lips, she is not human, and she is getting closer. His mouth is dry.

When she finally reaches him, she caresses his mouth with her index finger,

“The groom?,” she asks, smiling.

“Yes,” he replies.

“Take off your pants,” she says.

She has the last laugh

2010-05-09T10:36:00.000-07:00

Cassandra. Tragic and beautiful. Adored by Apollo who gave her the gift of prophecy. When he tried to seduce her, she rebelled, said, "No, I've changed my mind." Apollo was pissed. Tricked by a woman, a mere mortal. He couldn't take away her gift, so he added a twist, "No one will ever believe you." Thus the most gifted seer in the western hemisphere was mocked and shunned. People said, "She's crazy." She's a madwoman ripping at her clothes. Laughed at. So the story goes. Yet, she has the last laugh when every single one of her prophecies come true. She is the woman who no one listens to, yet she is the only one telling the truth. It is a familiar conundrum.

Image: Anthony Frederick Sandys, English Pre-Raphaelite.

Persephone mourning Demeter

2010-05-05T17:04:00.000-07:00

What if the roles were reversed and Persephone descends into Hades, searching for her mother, Demeter? What if she finds her, contentedly sipping red wine and eating pomegranate seeds. Nonplussed. She approaches her and says, "Mom, come home." And Demeter replies, "I'm not coming home. Ever." What happens to her then?

Image: Evelyn Pickering De Morgan. English Pre-Raphaelite painter. 1850 -1919

I dreamt he cut out my heart

2010-05-04T10:31:00.000-07:00

I dreamt a foreign born god cut off my head, my legs, my arms. I dreamt he cut out my heart. After he had finished butchering my body, he scattered the pieces to the four corners of the earth. After my resurrection, I didn't recognize myself. After my resurrection, I realized it hadn't been a dream.

Truck Stop Cinderella

2010-05-03T08:22:00.000-07:00

Orignally published in Dirty Girls,

edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel, Seal Press, 2008

Gracie Angelique DuBois drove to work that morning with the top down on her baby blue convertible, taking the country highway instead of the interchange, and singing along to Love to Love You Baby at the top of her lungs. It was the beginning of a fine summer day, the sun just beginning its slow ascent over the ridges of the mountains. She was sure this was going to be her last summer slinging hash at Riddley's Truck Stop on Route 27. She knew she was meant for better things. The fact is that Gracie Angelique DuBois had all kinds of dreams; cosmetology, modeling or even cocktail waitressing at a fancy bar in New York or L.A.

In the meantime, she always wore her tightest jeans to work, and her white high heels --- even though like Cinderella, she often went home barefoot because her feet hurt so bad. She did a survey once; she wore sneakers during a shift and averaged $15.00 an hour, but when she wore high heels, she averaged $25.00 an hour. It was hard to argue with the economics of that equation. Sex appeal and high heels provided a roof over her head. Gracie wasn't a stupid woman, she knew she was considered trailer trash, but she wore that as a badge of honor. Held her head high. Her mama and her mama's mama were trailer trash. But honestly there wasn't anything trashy about her trailer. She had real wood floors, glass bookcases and bright yellow curtains on the tiny windows that she had sewn herself. She got the idea from a magazine, using pillowcases and brass rings, and she thought, now isn't that clever. Her bed was covered with pink satin pillows with tiny bows across the front, and on her fake white marble night table was a crystal lamp and pictures of her mama and her mama’s mama. Gavin, her last lover, said, "Damn Gracie, all you women are sexy.”

She laughed out loud at this--- Gavin McFitch was slight, very shy, with cornflower blue eyes, but his cock was a monster. He couldn't kiss, and he didn't eat pussy, but Lord, she didn't care. She pulled herself together as she turned left into the parking lot of the truck stop. No sense thinking those kinds of thoughts now, not before she began her shift. Gracie was a true professional, and although it was a fact that every man in the diner dreamt of fucking her, she would never allow it because it gave her an edge. Again, it was hard to argue with the economics of all those men who came back to the diner again and again, always hoping for a chance.

Grace adjusted the straps on her blue silk brassiere in the car, were her boobs getting bigger? She hoped so. Her nipples were certainly erect. She scanned the parking lot and saw that all her regulars were there. The big rig over in the south corner of the lot belonged to Vinnie, a long haul trucker from New Jersey who liked his burgers rare and his coffee lukewarm. To the right, was a rig from North Dakota--- Timmy was a strange man, but his biceps were girl heaven. Despite her very strict rules, she often found herself fantasizing about running her tongue--- oh, never mind. Timmy was a nice man with a nice wife. She smiled when she saw Gus's beat up Lincoln Continental. He was an old timer who lived ten miles down the road in a tiny little town called Possum. She just loved his crinkly brown eyes, sometimes they made her melt. Yes, all her boys were here today.

Click here to finish

The Queen of Ghosts

2010-05-02T12:53:00.000-07:00

Hecate or Hekat, originally a goddess of the wilderness and childbirth--- is a liminal woman, defying definition, not part of the original Greek pantheon. Hesiod says she's another incarnation of a moon goddess. Two versions appear later in Greek mythology: an avenging woman, similar to Nemesis, and "The Queen of Ghosts" because her image was placed in triplicate at three-way crossroads, guarding the borders between the living and the dead.

However, like many women during the Medieval period she developed a very bad reputation among Christians. She became a witch, a bitch, attended by dogs, bats and the devil. A woman to be feared, often compared to Lilith and the Whore of Babylon. Now said to haunt graveyards by the light of a full moon, but once upon a time, she says, I was your mother.

Say good bye to the nymphomaniac

2010-04-28T07:18:00.000-07:00

Like Austen, the contemporary women novelist understands the power of language to both control and subvert the power of authority. Not only do irony and fantasy [myth] depend for their force upon a recognition of verbal constructions, but authors must maneuver around the language of dominant discourse in order to deconstruct cultural mythologies, including the myths that women construct about their lives...[and] inventing selves they can accept.

--- Nancy A. Walker, Feminist Alternatives: Irony and Fantasy in the Contemporary Novel by Women

Say good bye to the nymphomaniac, say good bye to the mad housewife, say goodbye to the suicidal woman, say good bye to the princess bride, say good bye to the evil stepmother, say good bye to the evil crone, say good bye to the neurotic woman, these are selves we can no longer accept. The Velvet Chamber is about to change all that.

New Contributor: Persephone Vandegrift

2010-04-26T16:47:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from her story The Perils of Metis:

She tried not to cry out as he placed his palms, freezing side up, over her breasts. She hated when he did it because it always sent a chill through her chest that would nearly stop her heart. The first time he did it, earlier in the year, she instinctively batted his hands away and then immediately regretted that decision as she watched him tower over her while raging at her to leave. And she did, with minimal pay, but when he requested her two weeks later offering to pay her double, she quickly learned how to deal with the coldness of his hands.

She would think of home.

She had spent most of the morning calculating what it would cost for a one way ticket and a taxi from the airport back to the farm; it was close to $1000. That meant only a few more nights like this with Zeus (not his real name). She did not know his real name. She did know about his unhappy wife and two children somewhere upstate, and that he was in shipping and receiving, but by the bundles of cash he carried, she guessed he received more than he shipped. She had nicknamed him Zeus because of his dark skin, white teeth, and his Italian or Greek accent; she did not know how to tell the difference. It was also something she had remembered from school; Zeus was some kind of a god who controlled all the other gods. And that is what her Zeus did, controlled many things and many people, especially in restaurants where every maître'd knew who he was by sight, but would never admit to his being there.

Of course her parents would not know she was coming back. Her mother would forgive her for not writing or calling. She would explain how hard it was to get started in a new city with roommates sneaking out and the piles of bills left behind, leaving out the part about the mediocre office jobs that could not pay as high as entertaining someone for one night. She could easily create some benign employment as easily as it was to spread her legs for money. It was not like she was giving these men her heart. That had always been reserved for the one; the one she was going to meet after she got out of the city – the tarot reader had assured her. She was so close to it, so close she could smell the dirt driveway she had fled down ten years ago with her father’s voice still ringing in her ears to "get out of this house! Now! Whore, get out!"

The words were so clear she thought her father was standing in the room. She stopped for a moment; her heart beating frantically against her chest. She had not thought about that particular memory in a long time, convincing herself that she had somehow rendered it irretrievable. In the midst of Zeus' freezing touch, she tried to shove that memory to the back of her mind, but it would not go. It ended up distracting her so much that Zeus let out a frustrated grunt and wedged both of his hands into her hips to keep her in motion. She had to oblige; there was never any other choice.

* * * *

Persephone Vandegrift currently resides in Seattle, Washington. Fond of all things mythological, her adaptation of The Bacchae of Euripides, Revenge and Sorrow in Thebes, had its debut in the summer of 2009 at Stone Soup Theatre, and was named one of the top six most memorable theatre moments of 2009 by the Seattle Weekly. Most recently she has been published in Lavanderia: A Mixture of Women, Wash, and Word, and was nominated for a Pushcart for her short story, "Dream Baby, Dream" which was included in Notes and Grace Notes Anthology, Root Exposure. Other mythological and historical work can be found via Megalithic Poetry and The Copperfield Review. She is Poetry Editor for Notes and Grace Notes and is hoping to finish a compilation of poetry, flash fiction, and short stories inspired by mythology.

I am the luminous moon

2010-04-25T14:24:00.000-07:00

Christine Sang during a performance of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass' Monsters of Grace, a story set to Rumi:

The vocal texts for the opera's 13 scenes -- love poems by the 13th Century Sufi mystic Jelaluddin Rumi -- inhabit yet another parallel universe. There are a few moments when Glass' music serves as a cross-cultural bridge between the sensual spirituality of the poems and the cool sublimity that is Wilson's trademark.

Sang describes her character:

"I am the luminous moon. A lover is looking up at me."

True story

2010-04-21T08:40:00.000-07:00

"Jungian psychoanalysis tends to assume that archetypal patterns derived from male experience are applicable to women's as well. As a consequence, female archetypes are interpreted according to male patterns, and the male patterns may be allowed to eclipse women's experience altogether."
--- Annis Pratt, Feminist Archetypal Theory

So if you've ever wondered why its impossible to escape the Madonna/whore dichotomy, look no further. Not to mention the bimbo, the whore with the heart of gold, the hag, the witch, the spinster, and the princess. When writers begin to interpret female archetypes according to female experience, worlds will collide, and one dimensional women will cease to exist. Real women not only have curves, but the capability of being sluts and mothers, grandmothers and whores, princesses and queens, all at the same time.

Bitch, don't drop that stitch

2010-04-21T07:46:00.000-07:00

The women's inner evaluation of herself swings back and forth between two extremes and reflects the polarized image of women that society offers. As many scholars have noted, images of women in the media as well as fairy tales and religious stories tend to be extreme rather than balanced, fragmented rather than holistic.

--- Demaris S. Wehr, Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Re-Revisions of Jungian Thought.

I am Snow White: Part 5

2010-04-11T07:50:00.000-07:00

Read Parts 1-4

I ran out of the chapel, down the grassy hill, underneath the stars and the moon. I ran from the vision of the dead princess. I ran so fast I tripped over my skirts, falling flat on my face, tasting blood. I did not like the girl. I did not like Snow White, but I did not want to see her dead. Soon I was at her door, out of breath, panting. It was locked. When I could finally speak, I said, firmly,

"Snow White, open this door immediately "

No answer. I knocked harder;

"Open this door. Snow White! Do you hear me? I know you are awake! And you must be a good girl, and open your door. Please! I will not have sorcery. You know what I must do now, don't you? Do you know? I shall tell you.  I must burn the chapel to the ground. The mirror is--- unholy. Now open this door!"

I remember that I had started to cry at this point, that I tasted more blood in my mouth, but this could've been bitterness as well. In times past, oh not so long ago, I would have been entwined in linen sheets with my lover. Blissfully free of the Duke who had begat a child with his sister. More blasphemy. Oh, I could not bear it. This must end. I knocked harder and harder, I screamed:

"Open this door---"

--- suddenly it flew open, as if pushed by the wind or an unseen hand. I saw Snow White in the farthest corner of her room; by the south window, in a puddle of moonlight.  She was dancing as if possessed; her black hair coiling down her back and around her face. What had suddenly descended upon my castle?   I shivered involuntarily, sat down on a brocade chair, legs shaking, and watched her. I was numb. I could think of nothing else to do. At least she is still breathing, I remember thinking, and not a pretty corpse. After a few minutes, exhaustion setting in, I tried again,

Snow White," I whispered, for I was now frightened of her. Who was she really?

"Snow White," I said again, a bit louder, "You must answer me."

She stopped suddenly, facing the window, her arms still high over her head, as if plucking invisible fruit from a tree. She turned slowly, blood trickling from her mouth.

"I am Snow White," she said, "and you have poisoned me."

"Little girl," I said, firmly, kindly, "You are dreaming. No one has poisoned you. You live a good life here. Now get back into bed. How did you cut yourself?"

Still, I couldn't help but notice that her wound was the same as mine. I fell--- what happened to her?

I led her to her marble wash basin, "Never mind," I said, wiping her mouth with cool water, and patting it dry, "we can discuss it in the morning. But now you shall go back to bed."

She replied, "But, I'm not awake."

I met her gaze, she wavered a bit, caught between the two, waking and dreaming--- so I repeated more firmly,

"That's right.  This is only a dream. Now, come."

I led her towards her bed and as I did, she collapsed int my arms in a dead faint. I carried her and lay her down, covered her with wool blankets, and drew the velvet curtains. I looked back at her, so still now--- but no, I mustn't think of that, I mustn't think of the dead princess. I must think of a way to save her and myself. I rang Esmerelda for a pot of tea, and while she grumbled and complained, I said, almost shouting:

"I have work to do. I will not have this child, I will not have sorcery. I will not have it. I will divest myself!"

She scurried away, frightened, and no doubt sure I had gone mad. But my purpose could not have been clearer.  I sat at my writing desk and began my letter to the Queen's Solicitor:

Dear Sir:

The bastard child you sent to live with me is quite insane, and is beyond my capabilities to heal or soothe her. She needs more than a governess and tutors for poetry, French and mathematics. No man will ever marry her despite her titled lineage. And you must know this. And the Queen must know this as well. She is my charge for the rest of my natural life, is this not so?

If this be the case, you must admit your trickery. Surely you knew of the girl's condition; her mind unhinged whether from magic or the devil, I do not know. Surely this is something the Queen herself must have observed, despite hiding her in a convent.

In short, the Queen Mother needs to decide upon another alternative for her care. It shan't be me. In the best interests of the child, I suggest she return to her former domicile, the Abbey of St. Joan--- and there in the hands of God, she will be safe.

Most respectfully, The Grand Duchess

I sealed it, and sent for my courier,

"Do not stop to rest or eat. This must get to the Queen in two days.  Do you understand?"

He nodded balefully, snatched the letter from my hands, jumped upon his horse, and soon disappeared into the woods. I knew two days was impossible, but not four.  The girl will be gone in a fortnight. Or less. And then I would destroy the chapel, just as I had said.  I had no use for magic. Sorcery. I saw what had happened to my grand-mere. They will burn it out of you. Better for the girl to be in the convent, better for me to be free.

I looked up at the sky, just beginning to grow light. A wood thrush trilled, the song echoing through the trees. Real and true.   This world is real and true, I had to reassure myself, again and again.  I pulled my cloak tight around my neck. At that moment, Harry appeared in the pale light;

"Oh," I said, "you startled me."

"Why did you send me away," he asked, holding up my letter to him, "was I not a good man for you?"

I smiled, in spite of myself, "Very good. Most excellent."

"And," he continued, "was I not your lover who adored every inch of your body?

"It's the girl, Harry.  Snow White. The Duke's bastard child.  Perhaps insane, perhaps a bit of a witch as well."

He frowned, "Then best for her to disappear. Most witches end on the cross, their hands and feet on fire. It's not a pretty sight."

"No, it is not." I did not tell him about my mother's mother.

"But even a witch," he said, smiling, "could not find us in the stables."

"I am the Duchess," I replied, relieved to be speaking of something else, "I cannot be bedded in a stable. But soon, very soon, we shall be lovers again. I've asked to have her removed, perhaps back to the convent."

"Then I shall impatiently await her Ladyship's summons," he replied smiling, and left.

In the days that followed I was very kind to the girl, solicitous, almost loving. Not surprisingly she had no memory of that night. I did not press it. She was fragile enough. I could almost feel sorry for her. Of course, I was haunted by the vision in the chapel, how could I forget? Nothing, I admit here, was ever the same again. Yet in those days, I did my best to dismiss it, as one dismisses a shadow---

Indeed at times I was convinced I could be strong, very strong, and fight off anything that dared cross me, be it man or the devil himself.  Then on some evenings I gave up all pretense of strength: the young girl in my charge was undoubtedly exceedingly strange, and quite possibly evil herself. And in my blackest hour, I believed that I too might be insane, or dreaming. On those nights, I wandered the grove with a flagon of red wine, almost daring the darkness to come upon me; a ghost, a witch, a devil. Yet nothing happened.

One afternoon, as I escorted her from her French tutor to tea in the main salon, she turned to me, and said,

"You did not poison me."

I stopped to look at her, and in this light, framed by gilt doorway, she appeared as all little girls--- in a velvet riding jacket, white ribbons in her hair, her face, all fresh and shining. Guilt assailed me;

"Of course I did not."

I took her hand again, but she shrugged me off, and continued,

"My mother poisoned me."

"Snow White, you musn't tell lies----"

I tried to grab her hand again, but she stepped back. Now we faced off in the long, low hallway, soft light shining through the stained glass. She continued,

"And she's reading your letter now. The one about me. And her Highness is not pleased."

"Why are you telling me all this now?"

"Shhhhh," she said, straining to hear, eyes wide with terror.

"What?," I asked, glancing over my shoulder.

She crept over to the main staircase, whispered, "So fast! The horse is so fast!"

Without thinking, I asked, "Are you a witch?"

"They're coming," she said sadly, turning back to face me, "and I am Snow White."

Angela Carter

2010-04-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

From an earlier post---

The inspiration for Tales from the Velvet Chamber of course owes much to Angela Carter’s critically acclaimed collection of fairy-tales, The Bloody Chamber published in 1976.

One of Angela Carter’s strategies is to reveal the hidden societal and religious constraints these women had to endure. She shows us the broader social and political picture. Carter believed that “a successful retelling delicately re-imagines the story’s content while preserving the boundaries of a form that led to such remarkable narrative stability.” The idea is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The idea is retain the original magic, the original enchantment, the glamour, the timelessness that is evoked with Once upon a time.

Image of Mermaid

An excerpt from: Luminous Beings

2010-04-03T08:59:00.000-07:00

I opened the sliding door, and a cloud of bluish-gray dust swirled up, momentarily possessing me until I was released in a fit of sneezes. The next room was empty. In fact, it was not even a room at all, but a temporary space formed by four sets of sliding doors. This in itself wasn’t so unusual. My grandfather’s house was similarly full of sliding doors that sliced a larger room into two or three smaller chambers. But every time I opened another door in the old woman’s house, I was confronted by another similar room with more doors, and soon I had no idea if I was passing through a room I had been in already, or if I was actually penetrating a deeper part of the house. I grew dizzy, circling through the rooms, searching for Mimi-chan, spiraling into increasingly tighter knots of fear. My face and hands were coated in cold sweat. Finally saw a door I knew I had not yet opened. It was a Western-style door and I gave the doorknob a good yank.

A group of faces greeted me. Little girls, each about two feet high, stood on a shelf wearing kimonos in varying shades of red, their puffed sleeves suspended in the air as if they had been dancing just a moment before. Some sat on embroidered cushions, while others held black-lacquered musical instruments. But there was something sad and strange about them huddled together on the shelf, and it was only when I stepped forward to take a closer look that I realized I had found the old woman’s doll collection.

I touched one of the faces. It was rough and more chalky than I expected, like a boiled eggshell. I picked up another doll, and she slipped through my fingers. When I caught her, something lodged into my palm, piercing the skin as though I had been bitten. I put the doll back on the shelf and began to try to retreat through the house, my hand throbbing, my eyes smarting.

Mimi-chan and the old woman intercepted me. “What do you think?” the old woman asked.

Mimi-chan looked gorgeous, dressed in a bright pink kimono with a yellow lining peeking out of the sleeves and the collar, and a gold obi cinched tightly around her waist. Her hair had been lacquered into an elaborate series of stiff waves, and her face painted a flawless, harsh white. “One more thing,” the old woman said, and slid out of the room.

“Mimi-chan,” I whispered. “We have to leave.”

“The old lady told me lots of things. She promised to teach me how to do the tea ceremony. And old dances. And how to arrange flowers.”

“There’s something wrong with this place. What that lady,” I insisted.

“I think she’s nice.”

“She’s turning you into a doll.”

Mimi-chan lifted her chin defiantly. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Well, I’m leaving.”

“You’re leaving anyway. You’re going back to America.”

“I’ll be back,” I protested. “What am I going to do when I come back and you’ve disappeared?” I could hear the old woman shuffling towards us. “Listen,” I whispered urgently, “how do you know if someone is a ghost in Japan?”

“Simple,” Mimi-chan said. “They don’t have feet.”

The old woman returned with a comb made from a warm, mahogany-colored shell and carved into the shape of two dragons. “This will make everything perfect,” she smiled.

“Obāsan.” Grandmother. “There’s a cockroach on your toe!” I shouted.

“What?” The old woman lifted the hem of her kimono, her face wrinkled into prudish disgust. “Where?”

“There!” I cried, and pointed to the floor. “There!” I repeated, shouting at Mimi-chan.

The inside of the old woman’s kimono was an unbroken horizon of scarlet, the strong color pulsing with vitality, as if lit up from behind. “I don’t see anything. Where? Where do you see it?” She bent her head and searched and searched for the cockroach.

I grabbed Mimi-chan’s hand and we flung open the paper doors, their thin skins suddenly feeling very feeble between my fingers, as if the house would disintegrate if touched by rain.

by: Marie Mutsuki Mockett
New Contributor to Tales from the Velvet Chamber
"Luminous Beings" was published in Epoch in 2007, in Volume 56, number 2

Image: Flickr

Flash Fiction

2010-04-01T07:11:00.000-07:00

Only the rat is my friend. While the dwarfs are out mining and the other woodland creatures are frolicking outside, building daisy chains and polishing the apples, he plays checkers with me, and never snitches when I cheat. He takes the blame willingly when I slip laxatives into Grumpy’s prune juice, or feed Doc’s violin to the goat that never seems to leave the living room. The beady eyed rodent nods sagely as I bitch about my stepmother in unprincesslike syllables, gnawing on goat droppings and wiping his whiskers on the divan. Only the rat sees me with my hair down, nibbling a few ebony strands loose to feather his nest with. Which is why, as he scampered over and danced on the key, I let the old woman in with her combs and laces.

"Snow White is Bored," by Helen R. Peterson.

Helen R. Peterson is the managing editor of Chopper Poetry Journal out of New London, Ct, and has previously published in Fell Swoop, Main Channel Voices, Gloom Cupboard, Tonopah Review, Cartier Street Review, Poor Mojo’s, Wilderness House Review, Battered Suitcase, diddledog, Hiss Quarterly, Right Hand Pointing, and many others. Her work was also featured in The Work Book, an anthology put out by Poet Plant Press in 2007.

The Fairy Tale Review

2010-03-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

I received a lovely email from Kate Bernheimer, Founder and Editor of the Fairy Tale Review, in support of The Velvet Chamber, by offering to send this call for writers to their contacts. This is such wonderful news because it is one of the most valuable and best known resource for writers, scholars, artists and editors engaged in similar work. From their home page:

"An indispensable addition to any collection concerning itself with the mythic material of childhood—both childhood's experiences and its traditional tales, and how they reverberate through adult lives."  

—Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and Mirror Mirror: A Novel

Ms. Bernheim also graciously suggested a list of possible contributors from her book Mirror, Mirror on the Wall; Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales, as well as My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me; which is forthcoming from Penguin with a foreward from Gregory Maguire. Contributors include such authors as Shelley Jackson, Kathryn Davis, Joy Williams, Kellie Wells, Francine Prose, Kelly Link, Lydia Millet, Alissa Nutting, Stacey Richter, Joyce Carol Oates, Karen Joy Fowler, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Aimee Bender, Francesca Lia Block, and more.

The Fairy Tale Review also has an ongoing project; collecting volumes of fairy-tales which are in danger of disappearing from the world. They are asking people to send their books, and include a short narrative about how they acquired it. I'm sending a first edition of The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner by Daniel Defoe with

"nearly one hundred original drawings and decorations done from sketches made in the tropics specially [sic] for this work by The Brothers Louis and Frederick Rhead. By arrangement with Harper & Sons, New York, 1924."

The book is falling apart, but still very beautiful. I had originally bought it when my niece was born--- as an investment for her, a college fund perhaps. Now, it seems like a perfect addition to the library the Fairy Tale Review is creating.

Hera: Virgin Mother

2010-03-26T17:14:00.000-07:00

"Hera, queen of the Olympian deities. She is a daughter of Cronus and Rhea, and wife and sister of Zeus was mainly worshipped as a goddess of marriage and birth. It is said that each year Hera's virginity returns by bathing in the well Canathus. The children of Hera and Zeus are the smith-god Hephaestus, the goddess of youth Hebe, and the god of war Ares. According to some sources, however, her children were conceived without the help of a man, either by slapping her hand on the ground or by eating lettuce: thus they were born, not out of love but out of lust and hatred."

Hera had other problems as well. Notably, jealous bitch. Maybe she's so unhappy because every year, her virginity returns. Can you imagine? Having to start all over, year after year after year. What a tedious ritual. It must really get on her nerves, and who could blame her? Plus, how does she explain those two children? The idea of a virgin birth is a bit far fetched. Mary pulls it off in the Old Testament, but just barely.

"Hera." Encyclopedia Mythica. 2010. Encyclopedia Mythica Online. 26 Mar. 2010 http://www.pantheon.org/articles/h/hera.html.

Image: Marc Travanti

Special thanks to Nick Daws' Writing Blog

2010-03-24T08:02:00.000-07:00

Nick Daws posted a great link: http://www.mywritingblog.com/2010/03/tales-from-velvet-chamber-call-for.html on his blog for this book project. I am grateful for the support. By the way, his blog is a great resource for writers. Thanks again, Nick.

Wounded Artemis

2010-03-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

Artemis is part of the triad of the Greek Virgin Goddesses; which includes Athena and Hestia. Jean Shinoda Bolen in Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women, explains that “these three goddesses personify the independent, active, nonrelationship aspects of women’s psychology. All three represent inner drives to develop talents, pursue interests, solve problems, compete with others, [and] express themselves.”

This is the ideal. However, in popular culture, she is not represented as the ideal. She is wounded. This woman, she who goes out into the world, she who is independent, competitive, in other words, she who wants it all--- is often punished. I think of her as Wounded Artemis. I think of her as a woman with arrows piercing her side because there is always a price a woman pays for wanting too much. God help her until she find her man. This is one of our narratives, and we're stuck with it--- until we write something different.

Worlds within words

2010-03-20T13:51:00.000-07:00

"As the cultural myths of patriarchy are questioned, researchers and creative writers alike begin to reread the myth and to reexamine old and new discoveries in their efforts to uncover the ancient myth behind the surface stories."

--- Thelma Shinn, Worlds Within Women: Myth and Mythmaking in Fantastic Literature for Women

Genesis Revised

2010-03-19T14:48:00.000-07:00

Genesis 1:2

A blue river flowed into Eden to water the garden.  It came from the tops of the mountains collecting ice and snow until the water shone like the stars in the sky, and there it divided and became four rivers. And these four rivers circled the earth and brought forth trees and flowers. Then The Creator took man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. His name was Adam Kadmon.

As the man who was the first man, he alone, of all creatures, had a soul, a heart, and a desire for knowledge. He saw the tree and said, You are tree. He saw the river, and I said, You are river. And thus he continued for many nights and many days naming all the things that crept and crawled along the earth, all the things that swam in the river. All the things that flew over the mountains; the hawk, the raven and the dove. He named the rain, the wind and the sky. And on the 7th day he wept for although he named everything, he had nothing.

The Creator saw this and took pity upon him, and said,

"I will send you woman, and she shall be called Eve and she will be the first woman of all women."

And so it came to pass that Eve was a born in the opaque light of the moon. She slowly took shape from the dust of the stars and the ice from the mountains, until she stood tall in the light. Adam Kadmon said to her:

"You at last are flesh of my flesh."

Genesis 1:3

Yet the serpent was more subtle than any other wild creature that the Creator had made. He said to the woman:

"Come eat from the Tree of Knowledge. See how the apple shines in the light. See how round. See how bright"

And indeed Eve was beguiled for the apple was both round and lush. Above all living things in the garden; the cool river, the wild creatures, the tall grass filled with flowers and insects, none were as enchanting as the apple that hung from the Tree of Knowledge. She had only to lift up her hand, and pick it. It hovered in the air over her head, twisting in the light of the sun, glittering like a jewel.

"Come," said the Serpent, "What harm? Surely you desire knowledge. The Creator knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like the Creator, knowing all good and all evil."

Eve saw that the tree was good for food, and that is was a delight to her eyes, and the tree was to be desired to make one wise, so she took of its fruit and ate it. She bit into the skin and the juice dripped from her mouth, and she saw that it was indeed sweet.  She ate the whole of it, slowly, slowly until it was gone, and said to the Serpent:

"I am not as I was before." And indeed she had been transformed.

At that moment, Adam Kadmon came into the glade and saw that Eve had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. Eve picked another apple, and he, too, partook of its flesh, and he too saw that it was sweet. He said,

"We have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, and now we shall eat from the Tree of Life, and we shall live forever. We will be like unto the Creator, boundless in our existence, in our wisdom."

Then the Creator appeared and said, "Behold, man and woman has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, now lest you put forth your hand and take of the Tree of Life and live forever--- you will now return to the earth to till the ground from which you were taken."

He cast out both man and woman, and at the east end of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the Tree of Life. Outside the Garden, the air was cold, and they covered their bodies with leaves and vines. After they had slept, they made their way through other gardens, through mountains, and fields of wheat and corn. They traveled for many days and many nights

Finally, at the mouth of the blue river, the source for all the other rivers, they lay down together as man and woman. And so it came to pass, outside the Garden of Eden, that the first child, a daughter, was born. Her name was Lilith. And she was like unto her parents; eternally human, wise, and mortal. And no man, woman or child has ever again beheld the Tree of Life for the way to the Garden of Eden had disappeared into the shadows of night.

Another look at Lilith

2010-03-13T15:05:00.000-08:00

I've always loved the the virgin. She's so easy to perform. The text is so secure. It is unchanging. Predictable. But its rare when I play the whore. You ask yourself; should you ever be allowed to feel this good? You'd think the choice would be easy, but it's not. It's not an easy choice.

It's not easy dressing up in high heels and waiting for your lover. It's not easy pacing around your small New York apartment, candles guttering in every room. It's not easy knowing that tonight is the night--- the mask of Lilith lays like a shadow on the bed.

I picked it up. I put it down. I tried it on. I took it off. I fixed my make-up. I put on music. I avoided the bedroom, the mask, the other, but not for long. When the buzzer rang at 10:00 p.m., I swept the mask off my bed, and put it on. Done. My heart was pounding.

When he walked in the door he said, Turn around. And so I did. He said, Turn around again. And so I did, but more slowly; more grace, more panache, more sex. It was starting. It was beginning and I couldn't stop it--- I was giddy. I saw carnival lights blazing, the roller coaster before it begins its fatal drop. He smelled like cotton candy. Lilith appeared, and I fell in love all over again. I think, why am I always so afraid of her? She's beautiful.

Should you ever be allowed to feel this good?

I didn't notice or care that I was stripped down to just high heels, that he had placed a mirror next to the bed. I wondered.  I wondered who we were looking at.  I wondered if we were voyeurs; a side-show for ourselves. I saw calves and thighs, tangled up with black boots and blond hair.  I saw another couple dangling at the top of a carnival ride, complete with screaming woman, gaudy lighting, and a man desperate for orgasm. The clowns and the ghosts and the devils all begging for attention. Dante finally meets Beatrice, but alas she is a witch.

We came at the same time.

He jumped out of bed, threw open the bedroom window, his chest heaving, "Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ" --- his naked body covered in sweat. And me? I was a dream of a girl. I was a girl inside of a girl. I was no one. I was nothing but black sky and blue stars. The shoes had flown off, but was that still my smile in the mirror? He blew out the candles, jumped back into bed, and we both passed out. The next morning, I only knew one thing: Do not look at your body.

He got up to shower.  Even when I was alone, I still did not look. I lay hidden beneath the sheets. I knew I was wounded. He knew this, too--- don't look. He knew this because after his shower, he threw on his clothes, kissed my cheek and left. I heard my door close. I heard his footsteps in the hall, down the stairs, out the door, then onto the street, an echo.

When he was gone, I finally looked at myself--- saw that my legs were tattooed up and down with bite marks. As if a rabid dog or a wolf had gotten control of me, sunk his incisors deep into my flesh, and wouldn't let go. I needed a rabies shot, antibiotics, and cold compresses.  I needed to see a doctor, a shrink, a priest. A shaman. I needed to call my mother but she was dead.

I couldn't walk for a week. He never called. Lilith, the cold beauty of sex and power, went back into the shadows. I washed the dishes, cleaned the sheets. I threw out the candles, and the circus left town. Life went back to normal except for this: I know she'll always come back.

Should you ever be allowed to feel this good?

Yes, yes, and again, yes.

Yes.

Image: Original "Barbie." Lilli by doll designer, Max Weissbrodt.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett: Picking Bones from Ash

2010-03-09T17:34:00.000-08:00

Marie Mutsuki Mockett's novel, Picking Bones from Ash, has just been published to great acclaim by Graywolf Press in October 2009. At a reading at Greenlight Bookstore, curated by Ron Hogan, Lori Adelman from a local New York Times blog had this to say about the author and her work:

Ms. Mockett, who was born in California to a Japanese mother and an American father, transported the mostly Brooklyn-based crowd into her literary world of Greek gods and geishas. Her debut novel isn’t easy to label, as the author herself conceded in a recent blog post, but can loosely be described as a multi-generational story of Asian women that doubles as a fairy tale, complete with “girl power and ghosts.”

Then I understood with perfect clarity why Ron Hogan wanted me to meet her. Her voice seems to be mapping a terrain similar to this book project--- venturing outside the enclosure, outside the safe confines of established narratives of fairy-tales and myth, and creating her own. She's just submitted her story, Luminous Beings, for this anthology, and I am so flattered and pleased.

After a couple of emails, I clicked on the link to her blog, and read with great delight a post about her reading at Greenlight, and how the discussion afterwards veered towards the dreaded "F" word, feminism.

"What did I think of the fact that reviewers complained that the men in the novel were not redeemed at the end, while the women were? (I pointed out that the Asian guys were all pretty nice. It was the Caucasian men who took a beating). How did I reconcile the fact that Francois celebrated his daughter's talents, even as he denigrated other women? (Lots of men-hell, people-are compartmentalized this way. Remember: Zeus' favorite child was Athena, a girl). And did I think I had written a feminist novel?

I've been wrestling with this concept ever since my novel was published. It's pretty hard to avoid that fact that the early adopters of my book have been self-identified feminists and that the book strikes a chord with them. Others-including an editor who became upset with my main character-become angry with the way the women in my book behave, and with one choice in particular. That "choice"--sorry to be vague but I'm trying to avoid spoilers--is something that Amanda told me was "very feminist."

I like to think I can define that word any way I choose. I think of it as empowerment and as the freedom as a writer to step outside proscribed gender roles, and still tell a good story. However, until very recently, women writers had to choose from precious few narrative options--- the most popular, she who gets the man, or my favorite, she who goes crazy and kills herself. Nothing like a good Sylvia Plath story. Yes, indeed.

Is it really that difficult to understand that a good writer, feminist or not, should have the choice to subvert the male paradigm and tell her own story? Finally I really love the closing to Mockett's post:

"Don't get angry at a female writer when she "fails" to soothe you in the way you wanted her to. That is your problem."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Honored Guest: Patriarchal Poetry

2010-03-08T09:57:00.000-08:00

Gertrude Stein gives us a lesson on how to subvert the patriarchy. She says, in essence: Language itself is transformative. Let's get down to brass tacks and tear apart grammar. Let's reveal the subtext of nouns. Explore the hierarchy of verbs. Bitches, its not our language.

Here below is an excerpt of Patriarchal Poetry. Some say this piece is unreadable. Some say it has to be read out loud to hear the music. I find it strangely familiar and instantly recognizable:

"How do you do it?
Patriarchal Poetry might be withstood.
Patriarchal Poetry at peace.
Patriarchal Poetry a piece.
Patriarchal Poetry in peace.
Patriarchal Poetry in pieces.
Patriarchal Poetry as peace to return to Patriarchal Poetry
at peace.
Patriarchal Poetry or peace to return to Patriarchal Poetry
or pieces of Patriarchal Poetry.
Very pretty very prettily very prettily very pretty very
prettily" (Yale 133).

Changing the story

2010-03-03T11:48:00.000-08:00

"I am interested in narratives that are capable of effecting change...I describe a narrative process that can both '"represent women's experience and redefine the premises of representation."'

---Gayle Green, Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition.

I Am Snow White: Part 4

2010-03-01T12:43:00.000-08:00

Read Parts One, Two, and Three.

I saw the girl to her tutors, then locked myself in my chambers. I banished all the maids: "Yes, Madam can undress herself tonight. Yes, I am sure that will suffice. Thank you Esmerelda, Thank you. Good night." When I was finally alone, I wrote a letter to my lover. I told him he must never again come to my rooms. I folded it three times, sealed it, and drank several cups of wine from a silver flagon. After awhile, I rose up from my writing table, and looked out the east window--- cold, silver stars had come out, and the moon was almost full. I found myself drawn to the ancient stone chapel.

I thought about how it might look in the white light of the moon; a dark silhouette against a stand of evergreen. The Duke claimed it was five hundred years old. I did not doubt this. And now it called to me. I realized then that I was sad. I could not see my darling Harry anymore. But it was necessary to survive. It would not serve my reputation, and the girl could not be trusted. Not at all. She was mad. I threw my velvet cloak about my shoulders, made haste with my riding boots, and strode out into the night.

I could see it in the distance, on a short rise, heading toward the tree line. I was aware of the wildflowers beneath my feet, the smell of the sea. As I got closer, the chapel, directly in the path of the moon, shone as if possessed. The large wooden doors wielded easily to my touch. The walls inside were thick with moss. A marble and gold cross at the altar was nicked and burnished by the smoke of a thousand candles. The statues of the Holy Mother and her Blessed Son, sat far back in the shadows--- as if brooding. The prieu dieus had long succumbed to moths. Yet I still found it beautiful.

The frescoes along the east and west walls were faded, but it was still possible to discern a portion of each story as it unfolded; a lamb being led to slaughter, a virgin ascending into the skies, a white horse, the birth of a child, and a prophet rising from his tomb. A silk tapestry hung directly over the marble altar; the moon, the stars and the sun set against an indigo sky. Though quite faded it was still possible to see each gold thread.

I sat on one of the carved wooden benches and noticed something quite unusual. Someone had hung a heavy cracked mirror, richly beveled and bejeweled, on the west wall. And though I’d visited the chapel on many occasions, I had never seen it. "How odd," I said aloud, startling myself, "Did the Duke know about this?

I slid off the bench to investigate, and as I approached---- the surface seemed to shimmer, as if it had suddenly become a lake. Then it settled, and I saw a young girl, 12 or 13, dressed in grave clothes, on a funeral bier--- in the forest, in the bright light of day. Her face was impossibly pale, almost white. I stood transfixed. In shock. She turned to me, and said, "I am Snow White. And you have poisoned me."

To be continued.

The Virtual Story Project. Chapter One: Where Medusa heads to CBGB's looking hot in black leather and meets her destiny

2010-02-27T20:19:00.000-08:00

She was one of the hottest girls on the planet in the 1980's; year of the Ramones, and life in New York City. She had the blackest hair, the biggest eyes, and the tightest ass, Delilah. But her mother was hotter. Originally a Jersey girl, Medusa's hair was blacker and and five times bigger than her daughter's. M. liked to date men who rode motorcycles, wore black leather, and occasionally slapped her--- but only when she asked. M. needed a little Marquis de Sade from time to time; some S with her M, if you know what I mean. Powerful women have to be inventive to have an orgasm. And she was no different.

So last October, M. and Delilah went to CBGB's on the Bowery to hear The Stoned Boys. They were rip-offs of the Ramones, but still pretty loud. Delilah looked good, but M. was insane; leather studded jeans, skull earrings, red lipstick. Delilah reveled in her mother's beauty. She liked to say, "My mother, the outlaw," with a big shit-eating grin on her face. As they walked in, a wall of sound punched them in the face. "Excellent," they both screamed and laughed. At the bar, Deliah ordered a beer, and M. headed off to use the ladies.

But M. never made it. And Deliah never saw her mother again.

Write the next chapter. Posts should be apprx. 500 words. talesfromthevelvetchamber@gmail.com

The Witch's Beast

2010-02-27T18:29:00.000-08:00

Kiki Howell (photo above), author of The Witch's Beast, A Torrid Twisted Tale published by Whiskey Creek Press had this to say about rewriting the bad girls of myth and fairy-tale:

"I wrote my retelling of The Beauty and the Beast to settle a long standing grudge I had with the Brothers Grimm. I felt the witch had a story to tell. When I saw that Whiskey Creek Press had a line of Torrid Twisted Tales, I wrote my version of the story completely from the witch’s point of view. The erotic nature of the story was an added bonus."

A review of Ms. Howell's The Witch's Beast:

You Gotta Read Reviews

"In the spirit of Gregory Macguire's Wicked, The Witch's Beast tells an old familiar tale from a different angle with a sexy spin. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and its characters. Ms. Howell paints Beauty and the Beast in an entirely differently light, putting your sympathies in places you wouldn't imagine when thinking of the original tale. Those once loved in the original story are shown in a new way and expands the character of the Witch who turns a Prince into a Beast, in more ways than one. I would definitely recommend you pick up this book so you can read this tale and find out the new ending to the Beast's story."

More evidence why this anthology is necessary

2010-02-26T11:02:00.000-08:00

From the New York Times ArtsBeat Blog, NYTimes.com, Patricia Cohen writes:

"Female writers and editors have noticed that the guest editors (and one introduction writer) selected last week by Houghton Mifflin to put together the publisher's "Best American" anthologies for 2010 are all white men. The blog SHE WRITES by Kamy Wicoff, reported that Barbara Jones, the editorial director of Hyperion Books and Voice (an imprint of books for women), had sent an email message with the subject line "women apparently not fit to judge this year."

We need a strategy to fight the underlying assumption that women writers are cute and male writers are serious--- wait, I know. How about an anthology that asks writers to revise the classics of myth, fairy-tale and the Bible. Stories with that kind of narrative stability have clout; they have power. This anthology is not about rewriting a cuter, hipper version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. This anthology is not about sexing up the Bible--- although that's not a bad idea.

This anthology is about subverting archetypes. This is a top down mission. When we start to have strong female heroes on the world stage again, in fairy-tales again, in myth again, and in the Bible again, we won't have all white male editors j~~udging~~ editing the best of American writers. The very idea would be absurd.

"Jung rarely described feminine archetypes as repositories of power for women."
----- Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women's Fiction

Pandora: Once upon a time there was a very bad little girl

2010-02-21T10:21:00.000-08:00

"Classics scholars suggest that Hesiod reversed the meaning of the name of an earth goddess called Pandora (all giving) or Anesidora (one-who-sends-up-gifts). Vase paintings and literary texts give evidence of Pandora as a mother earth figure who was worshipped by some Greeks. The main English commentary on Works and Days states that Hesiod shows no awareness of the mythology of a divine Pandora Anesidora giver of fertility."

Phipps, William E., "Eve and Pandora Contrasted" in Theology Today, v.45, n.1, April 1988, Princeton: Princeton Theological Seminary.

If Hesiod could subvert the text, so can we.

The Center for Fiction

2010-02-18T09:34:00.000-08:00

Last night, I attended, Beatrice@TheCenter, a reading series curated by Ron Hogan in partnership with The Center for Fiction. Ron is one of the very first people to have an online literary site, Beatrice.com In fact, he interviewed me for The Erotica Project.

Jonathan Dee, Leslie Jamison and Amy Green read gorgeous excerpts from their novels. The Center for Fiction began as the Mercantile Library in 1820. It's a classy organization; the atmosphere is very warm and inclusive, part library, part social club. I spoke to Ron after the reading to thank him for his tweet for Tales from the Velvet Chamber, and also of course to congratulate him for a lovely evening.

We spoke briefly about revisioning myth and fairy-tale for the anthology from the Western canon, but outside it as well; Asian, African, Egyptian, Indian, etc. I'd also like the anthology to possess a pan-sexual spirit; hetero, homo, trans, and whoever else is out there. The spine of the book is to subvert the classics for feminist ends--- and like the Center for Fiction, this mission is inclusionary and global.

Image: Center for Fiction, from the New York Commercial Advertiser November 2, 1820.

Cupid and Psyche---

2010-02-18T08:31:00.000-08:00

--- on a rooftop, at the corner of 12th Street and Avenue A. The year is 2006. Psyche is not punished for her curiosity, on the contrary, she is being rewarded.

Image: Marc Travanti, 2006, New York City

Eve & the Serpent

2010-02-16T18:24:00.000-08:00

Francis Quarles, "Emblems Divine and Moral," 1866, public domain

"I love new and subversive twists on old favorites"

2010-02-16T17:46:00.000-08:00

The Voracious Vegan, my new favorite blog, has this to say:

I love new and subversive twists on old favorites, especially when it is Fairy Tales that are getting the shake up. Fairy Tales are just one of the many ways that society’s patriarchal mores are instilled in us at a very young age. Ever notice that the stronger and more powerful a woman, the more evil she is presented as being? And the meek, young, frail women always seem to need a heroic rescue from a big strapping man, don’t they? Doesn’t it get so dull? Well, the amazing writer over at Tales from the Velvet Chamber has re-imagined an old favorite magnificently. You must read each part of her retelling of Snow White, it is gorgeous.

Thank you so much!

The Virtual Story Project

2010-02-16T17:15:00.000-08:00

I begin with a fairy-tale: Once upon a time. I write the first 500 words. You write the next 500 words, and send them to me at http://talesfromthevelvetchamber.blogspot.com/. I edit and publish the post with a link to the previous episode and so on and so forth. You get a by-line and a link to your website/blog. We all get a new story; communal as opposed to private. Kind of the way myth is created.

I might write about Medea, or I might write about the Wicked Stepmother. Maybe Hecate makes an appearance along with Pandora, you never know--- perhaps they all do. I pick the first and best that appears in my mailbox. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. The story goes on and on. Perhaps its published in the anthology, perhaps it always lives online. This is the virtual story project.

More details to follow.

Image: Jean-Marie Bottequi, "Eve, Adam Kadmon, and Lilith, 1993.