Susan Stinson

07:41 am: Window
Last night, right before I went to sleep, I rolled onto my back and inched up so that my head was against the window screen. I still couldn’t see the moon, so I opened the screen and hung my head out, eyes up, and there it was: bright, distant, full. A small cloud with oddly angular edges boxed it in for a moment, then rounded out a little and floated on.

Tags: daily life

08:15 am: Ruins
Perry Miller, from "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity" in Errand into the Wilderness


They did not forget that grace is an influx from the supernatural, but they preferred to concentrate upon its practical operations in the individual, and to conceive of it, not as a flash of supernal light that blinded the recipient, but as a reinvigoration of slumbering capacities already existing in the unregenerate soul. As in the ruins of a palace, so runs one of their favorite metaphors, the materials still exist, but the “order” is taken away; grace reestablishes the order by rebuilding with the same materials.

Tags: jonathan edwards, perry miller

11:39 am: A Place To Go
Michael Jackson and I were about the same age, so I literally did grow up listening to his music. I didn't buy it, I just heard it. I had a radio with a green leather case that I used to carry around with me sometimes. I'd listen with it pressed to my face so that the plastic strips over the speaker left red grill marks on my cheek. I can remember being out in the car port as a kid in Colorado, listening to Ben. (Clicking the link takes you to a video performance of the song).

The song, which is from a movie about a rat named Ben, had lyrics that just completely hit my little fat queer girl vulnerabilities:

Ben, you're always running here and there
You think you're not wanted anywhere
If you ever look behind
and don't like what you find
there's something you should know,
you've got a place to go.

There's also a part about how most people would turn Ben away, but Michael doesn't listen to a word they say. What I remember about listening to the song in the carport, with its familiar stain on the concrete that made my hands smell of oil if I touched it (I touched it a lot), was both that I really wanted someone to sing that song to me, and that I also wasn't sure if I myself could ever sing anything like it to a rat. I wanted to be accepting, but I had seen the movie, which I found scary and not a little gross. Did love for a rat match the song? Could I find it in myself to give that kind of love to a rat, and, if not, was there any hope for anybody finding it in themselves for me? I wasn't sure. I was loved then, and I knew it -- I was very solid in family love, but this was about something elusive, something else.

Later, I had a friend who I dedicated my first novel, Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, too. She loved to dance, and when albums Off The Wall and Thriller came out, she was wild about them. Off the Wall was the summer after we had graduated from high school, and Thriller came out my last year of college. I never watched music videos, but I can remember being on a dance floor somewhere with her while she, so excited, described the Thriller video to me in detail. I didn't really get it, but I remember. Just a little later, it was Billie Jean at the Marquee, a no frills women's bar I used to go to in my early twenties in Central Square in Cambridge. And that was, until last week, pretty much the end of Michael Jackson music in my head. I've seen animikwaan (who also posted a link to this poignant, insightful essay) writing about this and it's true: it has been so strange how last week's flood of his music has taken me back to specific times of my life, in sudden, unexpected detail.

Tags: deaths, fat

11:48 am: Reeling and Staggering
Perry Miller, from "Edwards to Emerson" in Errand into the Wilderness
From the time of Edwards to that of Emerson, the husks of Puritanism were being discarded, but the energies of many Puritans were not yet diverted – they could not be diverted – from a passionate search of the soul and of nature, from the quest to which Calvinism had devoted them. These New Englanders – a few here and there – turned aside from the doctrines of sin and predestination, and thereupon sought with renewed fervor for the accents of the Holy Ghost in their own hearts and in woods and mountains. But now that the restraining hand of theology was withdrawn, there was nothing to prevent them, as there had been everything to prevent Edwards, from identifying their intuitions with the voice of God, or from fusing God and nature into the one substance of the transcendental imagination. Mystics were no longer inhabited by dogma. They were free to carry on the ancient New England propensity for reeling and staggering with new opinions. They could give themselves over, unrestrainedly, to becoming transparent eyeballs and debauchees of dew.

Tags: jonathan edwards, perry miller, ralph waldo emerson

02:43 pm: Buddha Body Yoga: New York City
I had a really lovely experience this morning: a chance to dance with Michael Hayes, who teaches yoga classes in New York City for people with bodies of all sizes. His work was recently written up in the New York Times (there's a link to the article on his website).

Here's his site: Buddha BodyYoga. If I were in NYC, I would SO be signing up right now. Dancing with him let me do things I didn't think possible. With him, they just seemed calmly, clearly right there for me if I wanted. Such a gift.

Tags: dance, fat

01:10 pm: Go, Parker!
Last night, my nephew, Parker Stinson, won the USATF Jr. National Championship in the 10,000 meters! Whoohooo!! The race -- which was held in Eugene, Oregon -- is for anyone under 19, and he's just finished his junior year in high school, so he beat a lot of runners older than he is.

Got to be happy about all that! He plays a highly competitive game of 42 (a Texas domino game that my family loves), too.

Tags: parker stinson

05:04 pm: Early American Studies
Also, hey! I just heard that Journal of Early American Studies is going to publish an excerpt from Spider in a Tree! That's the first place that anything from the novel is going to be published! Yay!

The Ivy League scholars of early American history, they think it's good.

Tags: jonathan edwards

01:12 pm: Paul Lisicky
Seriously, y'all: Paul Lisicky
(That's a link to where you can add his blog to your lj friendslist to read him regularly.)

I'm still so moved by his reading last night that I hardly know what to say about it. Paul's mother died just over a month ago. He's been writing about her and his family, writing with a restraint, depth and generosity that strikes me not only as what art is for, but what human beings are for, for that level of connection and feeling, for that kind of attending to the people we love. He does it as if lightly, as if such a thing were easy, but it's tremendously difficult. Writing like that is transforming to witness. I go back to Paul's work, and it changes me.

This reading, too, he stood up there, as if calmly, as if easily, and gave us piece after piece that, with such elegance and economy, with such stunning control, made room in language for whole people, whole realms of emotion, that felt both vital, urgently familiar, and next to impossible to express. Everything he read is staying with me. One, a short piece about a boy who, on a visit to a faux Puritan village with his family, puts his head and arms into a pillory, is so wrenching and sustained in attention to an experience of public shaming and the costs of that to all concerned that it moves me far forward in understanding some of how Puritan influence is acted out in modern American lives, something I've been exploring myself for years. It made me gasp.

The whole reading was stunning.

Here are his books (and believe me, you'll want to know when the next ones come out):

Lawnboy

Famous Builder

Tags: paul lisicky

01:42 pm: Reading, Night, Trike
Last night, I rode the new trike to a reading by Holly Black (blackholly) and Mark Doty at the Juniper Institute at UMass in Amherst, and back.

It's strange being on the trike, since it looks just like the old one, but it's not. One thing I realized is that I didn't have a chance to say goodbye to the old trike at all. I wasn't down there when my love and her partner picked it up at my house to take it in for repairs, and then it became clear so fast that a getting a new trike made more sense than putting money into this one, and that my dear ones would give it to me, so it was possible. So the new one is a love trike as much as the old one is (may I remember to be appreciate how lucky I am), but I've put nearly four years and a lot of miles on the old trike, and this one, weirdly feels different. The new seat was uncomfortable, so I went back to the bike shop and got them to swap out the seat for the one on my old trike, rust and all. They also had kept my bell, but I got it back. My light disappeared Monday, so I got a new one. The seat made a huge difference ("There it is!" I said when I sat on it), but the trike also has a bunch of new and different noises, and the handlebars are more upright. I asked the guy to ride it around the block to make sure that the noises aren't new problems with bearings (he said no). Mostly, it's like a mind game -- since, when I get on the trike, it looks and feels as if I've been doing the same thing I've been doing for years, but there are all sorts of small differences that give me a bodily experience of not-quite-right. The front tire has a lot more tread, and makes a grinding sound going up hills. Small muscles ache.

But the ride last night -- for me, about an hour and fifteen minutes each way -- helped me get to know it. I was riding into a bit of a head wind on the way there, and it was threatening rain. Since it's been raining for days and days, that was no surprise, but the real showers were supposed to come later, and maybe hit on the way home.

Holly's reading, from a forthcoming novel called The White Cat intrigued me, with its con artist boy narrator who had done something truly terrible. Mark read poems that went to unbelievably difficult emotional territory and lit them up. His work is all about the sublime for me, and it dissolves calcified places in me, it just does. Also, he read a poem about being kissed by a goat. My love used to have goats, and I'm here to say that he nailed that experience, cold. It was so good to see him, and Paul, whose work and self I love. It was a rare and lovely thing to get to sit next to Paul and listen to the poems with him.

Paul is reading on Thursday. I'm not missing it, that's for sure.

We only talked very briefly before and after the reading. They offered me a ride home, but since I was on the trike, I had to say no and leave so quickly. It was eighty-thirty, and I was racing the rain and not sure that I could find the start of the bike path in the dark. I found it, though, and once I was on it, the ride was very beautiful. The trees along the path brought on fuller darkness with their cover, and also their roots raised the asphalt in spots from underneath. The resulting ridges can make for a pretty hard series of bumps, and are painted orange to make them easier to spot, but, of course, that doesn't help in the dark. Also this part of the bike path was made with recycled bottles, and the ground glass works its way to the surface in glittery patches that cause flats. No way to spot those, either, but the obscuring darkness was filled with fireflies along the whole length of the path. The ride was sensual, flickering, filled with small insects. Some hit my face, one caught in the strap of my helmet. More than one hit my closed lips, and, at one point, my mouth unwisely open, I had a sudden small pellet of life on my tongue before I spit. These were mostly gnats, I think, or mosquitoes, although one firefly flew past my glasses so close that it looked a comet.

I was submerged in the darkness, getting used the the different way my legs were working on my new trike, having bits of poems and feelings come back to me from the reading, and thinking about telling the story of the ride to Paul, who has a truly extraordinary gift of presence and responsiveness, I think, and who has been turning grieving into stunning moments of language in his blog in ways that make me want to both support him and to learn from how he's carrying loss. Losses.

I finally crossed the bridge over the river, which had men on it, leaning and talking, looking out at the water. Except for one runner, they were the only people I had seen in the hour I'd been on the path. I got back on the street, and was doing the little leg of Route 9 that had me in sight of my apartment, when a grown man in a pick-up, big bushy mustache, probably drunk, leaned out the passenger window to yell, "Hey, you fat girl, hey!" I looked up, and he looked back at my face as they passed, flicking a cigarette ash at me.

Then, I was home. It was nearly ten. I parked the trike, and jumped a little when good-hearted neighborhood boys gave each other a loud, "Hey!" as some pulled up in a car. Then I went upstairs and wrote the story of the ride to Paul.

Tags: art, fat, holly black, mark doty, paul lisicky, reading, trike

03:25 pm: Feast
Last night, my friends made a Midsummer's Night feast. We had mussels and chorizo in wine, homemade bread to sop up the sauce. Bluefish on turnip greens and scallions. Asparagus. Chocolate rhubarb cobbler. It was a truly generous meal, and when the things that were making a couple of us sad and lethargic made their presence felt, my friend went and got his Shakespeare, which was his grandmother's, and read Puck's speech at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumb'red here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend.
If you pardon, we will mend.
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call.
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

Then we stood at the screen door and watched the fireflies flicker at the dark end of the yard, where they don't mow. They were many and bright, even in rain.

Tags: daily life, northampton, poetry

03:13 pm: Ariel's Song
Full fathom five thy father lies;
              Of his bones are coral made;
    Those are pearls that were his eyes:
              Nothing of him that doth fade,
    But doth suffer a sea-change
    Into something rich and strange.
    Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
                              Ding-dong.
    Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.

Wliliam Shakespeare

Tags: poetry

09:47 am: Charlotte Cooper on Beth Ditto
Charlotte Cooper rocks the house with her great Obesity Timebomb post about Beth Ditto.

It brings up questions for me about whether or not Beth Ditto actually could control more of the circus and/or her commercial relationships without losing the reach of her voice. What are the costs to her, and to the culture, of trying harder to insist on that, or not. I'm sure she's fought hard to do what she's done, and I'm not sure that we'd still be hearing from her at all without some compromises. Still, Charlotte's piece makes me both appreciate Beth Ditto more and also worry about her.

Tags: beth ditto, charlotte cooper

12:04 pm: Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund
There's a deadline of June 30 (followed by one 12/31) for Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund applications. They make small grants to writers and artists. Write for guidelines and application: PO Box 309, Wilton, NH 03086.

02:32 pm: The Coils of Our Doctrine
Life is uncertain and imperfect (to state the obvious), but on Saturday, I felt so happy. I rode my trike to Look Park and sat on a bench next to the pond with the people in their paddle boats getting in splash fights (and getting yelled at about it). I had the library copy of Perry Miller's Errand into the Wilderness and my computer. It turned out to be easiest to type with the book and the computer balanced on the edge of the trike's big basket (which is bungeed together and has white paint chipping off.) A woman with a gray bowl cut came limping by in a green shirt and shorts, not the green of the leaves with the light behind them, but she was so alive in her clothes, the effect was the same. Insects came, and I stopped and wrote about them.

Here's something from the essay I was reading, "The Marrow of Puritan Divinity."

The convenant made it possible to argue that while God elects whom he pleases, He is pleased to elect those who catch Him in His plighted word, and that it is up to fallen man to do so. The subtle casuistry of this dialectic is altogether obvious. Yet the spectacle of these men striving in the coils of their doctrine, desperately striving on the one hand to maintain the subordination of humanity to God without unduly abasing human values, and on the other hand to vaunt the powers of the human intellect without losing the sense of divine transcendence, vividly recreates what might be called the central problem of the seventeenth cenury as it was confronted by the Puritan mind. (Miller, p. 74)

This helps me a lot to understand something about how Puritans thought. I love the phrase "the spectacle of these men striving in the coils of their doctrine." I was talking about it with my friend L., who is working on her profound and beautiful book this week. Entering the intellectual conversation about fatness with any kind of critical stance is very much to engage with a spectacle of twentieth century (with, I hope, just a little overlap into this century) people striving with the coils of our doctrine.

Tags: fat, perry miller, trike

07:08 pm: Sunday morning dancing
I got to the studio earlier than usual. They haven't been putting placards out on the stairs anymore, and I miss them on the climb to the fourth floor. Just a few people dancing, plenty of room to lie down and stretch out. There's a simple stretch where I lie on my back with my legs stretched flat and my arms out to the side, slowly bend one knee, then stretch it across my body while I turn my head in the opposite direction. It stretches my hip and my back like nothing else, and doing it usually makes my physical relationship to the world different. It's hard to say how, but that's how it feels. Even just the lying down flat on the ground, among other people, I don't take that for granted, especially not the getting up again. I trust the floor in a way a fat woman can't always trust furniture (even the barre in a dance studio, with its taped together break). Dignity looks different from there.

There was a very beautiful fat woman there with two younger dancers, maybe one or both her sisters, maybe the younger two in their mid teens. She does elegant, confident belly dance moves. I told her that I'm always happy to see her, and she said she likes to see me on my trike all over town. The choreographer I've danced with and spoken with before was there for the first time in a while, and she came up for a dance that I liked. She leaped in the air with me for support at one point. That was exciting. A lot of the more adventurous dancers seem to keep serious expressions, to want to communicate with parts of their bodies other than their faces. I smile and laugh, though, and I laughed after the choreographer jumped. In the middle of dancing with her, the dj came to join us, and then I was dancing with him. I danced with a woman who I love to see there. I think she must be at least in her eighties, and we were holding hands and doing a little, sweet, shuffling thing, then she wanted to go up so that we both spun around with our arms over our heads. Laugh. How could you not? Lots of dancing with the whole room, and admiring all of the physical grandness of people, some of whom fly on their feet or casually flip over backwards.

For the last song, I approached a young woman with a very sweet presence who came up to me the first or second time I came dancing and gave me a hug. She's self contained when dancing, and we had a dance that was moving to me, mostly about slowness and the hands and the fingers, and the nuances of pressing or lightening touch, and how much some of us live in our hands. We did a few of those disco turns, too, and we ended up standing still, touching foreheads. It was a beautiful thing.

Tags: dance

02:08 pm: Parker
My parents just called me, very excited. They were in the car coming back from Austin, where they had watched my nephew, Parker Stinson, win the Texas state championship in track and field for 3200 meters. He ran the two mile or so distance in 8:54, which is his personal best. The announcers on the video said that the state record is 8:52.

Here's a video of his race.

Yay! Way to go, Parker!

Tags: parker stinson

03:47 pm: Open letter
Open letter from Planned Parenthood in response to the murder of Dr Tiller. Click the link to sign.

The local vigil is tonight, 7 - 8.

08:38 am: Vigil on Wednesday
There's a vigil tomorrow night (Wednesday) from 7 to 8 at First Churches in Northampton to honor the memory of Dr. George Tiller, who was killed because he performed abortions. I'm going to be there, with a candle if I can find one. I thought other local folks might like to know.

01:38 pm: Edwards, Emerson, Perry Miller, David Ruggles, Celebration on Sunday
Perry Miller is one of the most famous scholars of Jonathan Edwards. I haven’t read him until now, for reasons that are slightly mysterious to me. Part of it is that there is so much to scholarship about Jonathan Edwards, and I was writing a novel, so a person has to draw the line somewhere. I knew he was important, though. Many times, his contributions were referred to in my reading, often with reference to his brilliance, and almost as often with caveats about how he didn’t understand or appreciate Jonathan Edwards’ theology.

I was determined not to do that, not to strip JE from his Calvinist context, but to do justice to it, to tell the critical, honest, humanly alive, attentive story in the best way I could. That meant trafficking in what JE would call “the things of religion” more than I had since I left my teens (and by religion, he means his fiercely defended interpretation of eighteenth century Calvinism), but it’s been important to me. I’ll leave the work of trying to get words around why for another time (those kind of explanations can be useful distillations, but there are more and deeper experiences to be had in the fiction itself).

But, a few weeks ago, I went on a fascinating tour of African American history in Florence (which is part of Northampton, but was founded later as a separate community). The tour was run by the folks who are working to get The David Ruggles Center off the ground. David Ruggles is fascinating: he was an African American man who was born to free parents in Connecticut, and he went on to be tremendously active against slavery in New York City in the 1830s and 40s. He was a journalist, he started the first African American magazine, he ran a print shop, and he said that he helped more than 400 fugitive slaves in their escapes north. He also did things like go down to the docks and perform citizen arrests on white ship captains transporting slaves internationally after that was illegal, and there was an attempt to seize him and sell him south because of it. At the end of his life (and he died before he was forty), he lived in Florence as part of the utopian Arts and Industry Community there (he also started a hyrdotherapy hospital; this was an amazingly energetic man.) The tour guide said that the Arts and Industry folks were very influenced by Emerson and the Transcendentalists, so I wondered if Emerson had read Jonathan Edwards, if there were a link.

So, I asked Ken Minkema from the Jonathan Edwards Center, and he told me about an essay called “From Edwards to Emerson” from Errand into the Wilderness by Perry Miller. It’s amazing. From his opening comments:

The real difference between Edwards and Emerson, if they can thus be viewed as variants within their culture, lies not in the fact that Edwards was a Calvinist while Emerson rejected all systematic theologies, but in the quite other fact that Edwards went to nature, in all passionate love, convinced that man could receive from it impressions which he must then try to interpret, whereas Emerson went to Nature, no less in love with it, convinced that in man there is a spontaneous correlation with the received impressions.

Another way of saying this might, it is evident, be to define Emerson as an Edwards in whom the concept of original sin has evaporated. This would satisfy the textbooks. Edwards sought the "images or shadows of divine things" in nature, but could not trust his discoveries because he knew man to be cut off from full communion with the created order because of his inherent depravity. But Emerson, having decided that man is unfallen (except as his sensibilities have been blunted by civilization), announced that there is no inherent separation between the mind and the thing, that in reality they leap to embrace each other. Yes, that will do for the textbooks, or for students' notebooks. Yet true though it be, such an account leaves out the basic continuance: the incessant drive of the Puritan to learn how, and how most ecstatically, he can hold any sort of communion with the environing wilderness.

And what that summary leaves out, of course, is the people who were already on this continent when the Puritans got here -- what the domination of those people did to everybody's souls. After the time period in Northampton when my book ends, Jonathan Edwards went to be a missionary in Stockbridge -- there's a whole difficult, rich story to tell there, too, for sure.

This post is all over the place, but I'm out of time. For now, I want to be sure local folks know that there’s another African American history tour on Sunday, followed by lunch and performances -- including by Evelyn Harris -- at the Sojourner Truth statue.

Tags: emerson, jonathan edwards, northampton, perry miller

12:45 pm: New National School Health Policy
It's a little overwhelming, and snarky at the beginning, but even scanning the impressive juxtaposition of evidence and arguments is compelling. Here, from Junkfood Science, is a very critical look at the new national school health policy around fat children.

I'm thinking about pulling some kind of event together in response to the new Massachusetts policy on sending BMI reports home to parents. Not sure what yet, and am thinking small-scale, but something.

Here's one of many passages I found striking. That piece about mandating much more extensive testing for fat kids (and adults), and then blaming us for those costs rings true:

The NASBE School Health Policy Guide says: “Obese children are two to three times more likely to be hospitalized and are about three times more costly to care for and treat than the average insured child… Children covered by Medicaid account for $3 billion of those expenses. Annually, the average health expenses for a child treated for obesity under Medicaid is $6,730, while the average expenditure for all children on Medicaid is $2,446.”

Fact checks: Fat children burdens? (It turns out, there is no correlation between a young person’s BMI and emergency room usage or visits to the doctor. Higher medical expenses are not because fatter children are sicker. They were 5.5 times as likely to have extensive laboratory and screening tests ordered in accordance with Medicaid guidelines for fat children or children with a family history of obesity, despite no evidence for efficacy. Then, the costs of those added medical tests are used to blame the fat children for raising health costs!)

Increasingly, Medicaid recipients must follow the state’s prescribed healthy diets and preventive wellness management in order to receive benefits, such as care for their special needs children.

Tags: fat