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Dear Kitty: Maryann's Poignant Memoir Friday October 4 "I am disillusioned and dissapointed with the stupid inconsiderate shallowness that people (supposedly superior to aninals) are capable of. But what is the point of saying something like that? And what does it all mean? You can't stop people trampling on your soul, and you can't prevent them fucking with your space. You could try to understand them, and I think initially you are always compelled to do so, almost instinctively, even though you know that this is futile and pointless, but you nevertheless try, because you don't want to face what you already know, because the reality is unbearably wrong. And so you keep lying to yourself even though you see through all your lies. This makes you hate yourself, for being a fucking lier. Worse, still, it is yourself that you are trying to lie to; and so you disrespect and offend yourself just to make some stupid-fuck look better in your mind than an animal - otherwise life would be obscenely vulgar and repugnant. Either way, it is unacceptable and you want to object but nobody gives a fuck and mental rape is not a crime in a society made up of simpletons not capable of being mentaly raped. "And so you are lonely, but you shouldn't be. "Your friend, Michal." Monday September 31Strength is for the weak ... "if I can't have too many truffles, I don't want any truffles." Looking through the trash on this mac I saw a file with the extension .pps. So I opened it and it was a POWERPOINT DEMONSTRATION! (Powerpoint is the New Language of America, in case you didn't know. In some universities it's COMPULSORY to present lectures in powerpoint format. And of course in almost all businesses. Powerpoint includes 'autocontent' and restricts each point in a demonstration to SEVEN WORDS OR LESS.) This powerpoint demonstration opened with the title page 'ANTEPRIMA CALENDARIO 2001 ANNA FALCHI". Then it was a series of pictures of a naked girl! That was the demonstration! There was no conclusion. I have looked at the pictures many times but I can't make head or tail of it. You should check out Liz's homepage - this is a link to her dream diary, but you can get to the index page from here. Thursday September 24 I caught a taxi with a crazy taxi driver. He had Phil Collins playing really loudly - I can feel it coming in the air tonight - and after some confusion over directions he said 'loud, isn't it?' indicating in the direction of the tapedeck. 'it's a classic though, isn't it? i suppose this is taking you back to when you first heard it?' No, i said, I was a child. We stopped at the lights across Stuart St below the octagon. 'DI - A - MANTE' he unexpectedly said. 'Diamante' he turned to me and repeated. 'That's the name of that car.' After I'd paid and got out of the car, but hadn't quite closed the door, I heard him mutter 'you're wonderful.' I spent the night playing with Steve's lanky, small sister. In the morning I had a beautiful dream. My sister and I were playing around. The world radio had broken down so we started a local radio that was a record arm extending into a bowl of molten lard. It played a song with a wrenching opening that was a sort of cross between 'In Dreams' and 'will you still love me tomorrow', with a male singer. Then it played a U2 Song, Sunday Bloody Sunday crossed with a more modern one. My sister was dancing like crazy. I was kissing and hugging her and pulled her onto my knee, sitting on the edge of my bed, cradling her (the things I couldn't do to Steve's sister Jordan, who seemed so sad and tense.) She was relaxing. Then I said to her, 'Nik, I want you to tell me, is Mum as good to you as she says now, or are there still problems?' 'There are still problems,' she said, starting to cry. 'Last night, I wanted to have ice cream on toast. I was slicing it up and Mum said, 'That's ridiculous! Put that toast back!'' Then 'Smothered in Love' was written over the top of the dream. Sunday September 23 I've been writing a biographical statement as part of my application for the Fulbright Scholarship. I love the outdoors, I had such a great childhood, nature is great, but there is an intellectual world too, I have so much to offer, consider my grades, undoubtedly I have been consistently psychologically healthy for all my life, they leave little doubt. My parents encouraged my intellectual growth, but made sure that I balanced it with recreational activities. Blessed by genes and environnment, inoffensive, productive, patriotic, kind, and funny ... but I should just append what I wrote at the bottom of this page. Wednesday September 19 When you've been inside cursing yourself for lying sideways watching The Weakest Link and Petra Bagust for over an hour and you might not be able to move all night, but then you're outside in the dark stumbling across the middle of the football pitch, which is insultingly noisy because of the industrial zone road and the motorway and the borders are all streaming with cars, and your eyes won't adjust to the dark grass because of the car lights around the periphery and the saturated street lighting - that's Nature! (You have the entire internet - and you're going to read about a football field. You are, aren't you? That's all there is here. A story about an OLD FIELD.) You feel like you've taken too much aropax and the punchline is when you reach the hill that leads up to the motorway and it's not til the moment you're climbing it that you can see it's covered with even rows of daffodils and empty dirt, and you're thinking about The Prisoner - Tuesday September 18 This is an interesting article about the Bridget Jones Diary, Ally McBeal etc by Ginia Bellafante. Of course it is in Time magazine, who I can only suspect loved being able to headline with 'Is Feminism Dead' ... But Bellafante says in an accompanying on-line interview that she hopes her next published article won't be for Time-Life, so she can fuck with them too. Bellafante's ideas seem pretty weak in several areas. For example, she simply says that the Bridget Jones Diary shouldn't exist, instead of recognising that by daring to spew forth such horrible confessions, it identified something that women hadn't been able to articulate (for some reason) in any other way. If the Bridget Jones Diary hadn't called it to our attention, who would have? Who dared to speak abjectly? We need more chronicles of female abjection, hopefully from a radical perspective as well as from the conservative one of the BJD. The adherents of the concept of 'Girl Power' seem to either be unaware of the history of the ideas of sexual power they are are espousing, or to wilfully ignore them; they originate in the realms of the ultra conservative, having been most clearly articulated by Camille Paglia in 'Sexual Personae'. (Bellafante mentions this in her article, but seems to think there is some merit in Paglia's weak arguments.) It's difficult to find articles where feminism critiques itself for not having gone far enough; feminism is generally too defensive and addresses itself to the right, rather than inwards (here, for example. If your problem with feminism is that it has forgotten about SCUM, there's not much to read. (It seems disappointing that Bellafante's article is in Time, outside the feminist community.) Saturday September 15 Jackie De Shannon wrote most of my favourite songs: Needles and Pins, Breakaway, and He Did It (recorded by the Ronettes.) She was a rockabilly singer in the 50s, then, according to her biography, was 'one of the first established rock figures to see the potential for crossbreeding rock and folk. She was a crucial midwife to the birth of folk-rock, with the wonderful singles "Needles and Pins" and "When You Walk in the Room." Using the circular, jangling guitar lines that would become a prime feature of early folk-rock, both of those songs were covered by the Searchers for much bigger hits.' She wrote over 600 songs. If you are bored or actually even if not, go to the official Kraftwerk site ... they've updated it and made it the best site on the interweb. It works kind of like a drum machine where you can record your own music and play it back, but it's very simplistic and minimal, with appropriate graphics ... you'll see. I also just realised that if you go to the page with the wave on it and click the forward and back arrows, you can choose to listen to things like the Expo 2000 theme, or go to 'The Robots', where you can click on Robots that make noises, and if you wait a while there another arrow comes up, and you can make some Robots dance - ! THE CANCER SOCIETY OP SHOP In the mirror I noticed that I had many grey hairs. But I stopped looking so I don’t know how many. Another thing that I have is pimples and red skin on my chin. Besides that it’s depressing getting changed, because I have cellulite and I’m kind of fat, except I don’t have big tits; today I noticed that even though this is the case, it’s true what Leon said; my breasts look awful if I don’t wear a bra. The assymetricality of small breasts is the worst of both worlds. (Despite all the grotesque aspects of my body, I’m surprised to find re-reading this that it I feel attracted to myself as an object. Perhaps any reference to genitalia, even the ugliest, is arousing. I don’t think so though; I read a horrible story by Thomas Mann about a flat chested woman, although in the end he feverishly tried to start an affair with her. I wondered whether anyone would be repulsed by me. Although I’m not ‘flat chested’ exactly, perhaps this just means having small breasts? Is it in fact possible for a woman to be ‘flat chested’? And the woman in this story wasn’t at all arousing or attractive.) To anyone as prudish as me who will be offended by these anatomical details, I apologise; I’m only including this in the interests of veracity. I am in this shop trying to buy some nice clothes; I can never decide what I want to look like, because I have no fixed idea of myself. Am I pretty? No, I have a long face like a horse, and pimples, and besides all that I’m far too old … but am I intellectual? I don’t know … what that means is obscure to me, and I know that I’m not particularly intelligent, although I won’t go into details of how I know here … just believe me. In the end I feel a cold distaste for myself; the number and remorseless of my flaws makes me feel like my body is an army staging attacks on fronts too numerous to defend simultaneously. Faced with defeat, I feel something like bitter resignation … Leaving the shop via the wooden staircase, I passed an acquaintance on her way up; both of us are supposedly ‘intelligent’ girls, categorised that way, and I felt a sort of horror at seeing her walk up past me, perhaps she felt the same … Well at least I'm not an axe murderer or something ...
An index to old kitty entries, my links page, and my ontological struggles. XX ... and the Rock City Rocker index |