Creative Reading (first)

Creative Reading, then Creative Writing

“Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralyzed force,

gesture without motion” The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot (MB)

The house seems

To circle around you

Slowly. I circle around you, a wild

Animal near a fire. I remember

I would kill for you. I remind myself

It won't be necessary. –Sharon Olds (GA)

"Verse is dressed up that has nowhere to go,

You took away my glibness with my fear.

Forgive me that I stand in silence here.

It is not words could pay you what I owe."

(Apology for Understatement)-John Wain  (MOB)

"old life blown away in the blink of an eye...nothing left but all the time in the world to think about it"  Shawshank Redemption  (TS)

"His soul stretched tight across the skies

That fade behind a city block"

"Assured of certain certainties,  

The conscience of a blackened street

Impatient to assume the world"  Preludes TS Eliot (PV)

"Maybe that steps begins with giving up ownership of the most beautiful shell on the beach, not simply to save the life of a homely ordinary crab, but as an exercise in resisting the hunger to possess all things bright and beautiful."   Barbara Kingsolver, "Small Wonder."  (JG)

Beauty Myth

"Cosmetic surgery is not "cosmetic," and human flesh is not "plastic." Even the names trivialize what it is. It's not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: "a nip," a "tummy tuck."...Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice.

At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition--so that women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic does not show on her body, and how much of a female life does not show on her face?

You could see the signs of female aging as diseased, especially if you had a vested interest in making women too see them your way. Or you could see that a woman is healthy if she lives to grow old; as she thrives, she reacts and speaks and shows emotion, and grows into her face. Lines trace her thought and radiate from the corners of her eyes as she smiles. You could call the lines a network of 'serious lesions' or you could see that in a precise calligraphy, thought has etched marks of concentration between her brows, and drawn across her forehead the horizontal creases of surprise, delight, compassion and good talk. A lifetime of kissing, of speaking and weeping, shows expressively around a mouth scored like a leaf in motion. The skin loosens on her face and throat, giving her features a setting of sensual dignity; her features grow stronger as she does. She has looked around in her life and it shows. When gray and white reflect in her hair, you could call it a dirty secret or you could call it silver or moonlight. Her body fills into itself, taking on gravity like a bather breasting water, growing generous with the rest of her. The darkening under her eyes, the weight of her lids, their minute cross-hatching, reveal that what she has been part of has left in her its complexity and richness. She is darker, stronger, looser, tougher, sexier. The maturing of a woman who has continued to grow is a beautiful thing to behold.

Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time. A thin young woman with precancerous lungs [who smokes to stay thin] is more highly rewarded socially that a hearty old crone. Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden [an intrinsically unattainable standard of beauty used to punish women for their failure to achieve and conform to it]and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

What editors are obliged to appear to say that men want from women is actually what their advertisers want from women.

Women are mere "beauties" in men's culture so that culture can be kept male. When women in culture show character, they are not desirable, as opposed to the desirable. A beautiful heroine is a contradiction in terms, since heroism is about individuality, interesting and ever changing, while "beauty" is generic, boring, and inert. While culture works out moral dilemmas, "beauty" is amoral: If a woman is born resembling an art object, it is an accident of nature, a fickle consensus of mass perception, a peculiar coincidence--but it is not a moral act. From the "beauties" in male culture, women learn a bitter amoral lesson--that the moral lessons of their culture exclude them

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it."  (The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf, AE)