She says she gets it. I think she does get it. I get it too. You get it, right?

I sure as hell do. That Jeneane girl is all earnestness. And as I have told you, if you had only been paying attention, earnestness is a disappearing precious natural resource. It means, among other things, Unspoiled. On the Interwebs? Yes, even here. It means True.

True-talking, and unabashed to be so.

In other words, to know and love Jeneane—which is to say, to appreciate her as she is—you must turn your back on all this post-modern crap. Irony is useless. There’s no protection. It’s like asking men to remove their armor, and walk into battle unprotected.

Yes it is. For all of us … except me, of course. Because I have been battered about the head for long enough, I Let Go. You can think me any fool you want. I love the girl unabashedly …

And what does this all have to do with that miserable fuckin’ waste of time Facebook? I get to say miserable because I am an adult.

Not a college kid looking to hook up—a term conveying such a monster burden of sadness and the wrong, I’d have to write another book and I don’t want to.

But I will offer the Thought Of The Day. Let not the fifteen billion (or whatever absurd hell it’s up to now) obscure one simple truth: Facebook is not a platform. It’s hookup engine.

Jeneane goes on to quote Kara Swisher (see Kara’s whole url.)

…if that is all there is, can Facebook really build a viable and long-lasting business on what is essentially a bunch of games that will ultimately become wearying for users? Doesn’t it need more robust apps that actually are useful and relevant and make Facebook the service that Zuckerberg has often told me was a ‘utility’?

And there you have it. Two great women, doubting themselves (as well as deftly turning that doubt into public question) … and one mendacious man. (He really used the word Utility? Lying little shit.)

Why does the male lie so.

Money, honey.

Simple as that. The stone at the center. The bitter, bitter pill.

Shelley writes: I read ZAMM once, a long time ago. I remembered thinking after reading the work that this was a book written by a man for men, though there is nothing in the work that is even remotely sexist. I felt, though, that I was reading a book written in language I’ve learned to speak fluently, but wasn’t my native language. After Loren’s reviews, I might try reading it again, and see if I still suffer the same disconnect.

What was worse, we were supposed to like that book … and every other damn piece of writing that acted like half the world didn’t exist. I find that waay more insidious. I don’t remember understanding a damn thing.

Okay, not true, but if I’d faced up to what I understood perfectly well, I would have been appalled in real life (and therefore had no place to to live, me with two little, little kids.) Instead,  all that sort of feeling went underground where you better believe it ate at my cells. Turned my immune system inside out—we are mirroring creatures, and if the mirrors around us are all turned away, if the Narcissus spell has taken over the house, what am I saying? That sickness without begets sickness within?

You bet I am. Take care who you hang with. Better Pirsig should have written, Women, have your own money. Can you believe there was a time when the options were, for a girl without a high school diploma, and who could not clerk to save her soul, whose typing was a bloody nightmare: get married or hook. Blech. Revolting even to recount. As were the succeeding decades. Why am I telling you all this? It can’t possibly be of interest, you have your own life, it’s very hot where I live today.

Pirsig’s son was murdered in San Francisco, someone we all cared about after plowing through that many pages. It was just a stupid little holdup, where the person with the gun sometimes for no reason at all pulls the trigger. We were all sorry for his loss.

(I skipped all the boring parts. I bet I would again.)

My Dear Ms. Sessum,

Will you quit blogging such nice things about me …

How much easier to give than to forkin’ receive …

Most people never get out from under the rainshadow of their parents’ gaze …

It’s hard turf, hard to chart, hard to navigate. No maps. Lots of dark matter. A black hole or two, to marry.

Fate would bring a sweet soul into my life …

That awful noise you hear is some rusted hinge inside. Damned Fate, prying it open again.

Yours Truly,
Zo

Mme. Levy reports, “Someone’s just made a fascinating post on beach bags at BlogHer. I think they’re on sale!”

How to shift the thinking. Okay: women online who are connected to business in any way are as co-opted as the next person, it’s silly not to think so. And stupid not to remember.

Don’t be looking to BlogHer, or anywhere else that buys and sells, for any kind of political truth. Or support. Read the rest of this entry »

Catherine Orenstein’s Op-Ed Writing Seminars For Women:

“What I want to suggest to you,” Orenstein continued, “is that the personal and the public interests are not at odds …”

OMSJ … whole life wasted? (opens kitchen drawer)

“ … and the belief that they are mutually exclusive has kept women out of power.” Don’t you want money, credibility, access to aid in your cause? she asked. Read the rest of this entry »

“ Explicitness is almost always, in the end, pornography … ”

… writes Theodore Dalrymple, in his wonderfully intelligent review of The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir. As is the case in nearly all interesting reviews, the book at hand provides a springboard for the reviewer’s own thinking. Not that Dalrymple introduces much that is new to this reader, not at her ripe old age, which—sigh—in thinking years, must be at least 180. But there is that semi-(quasi?) erotic delight in finding the world, the ideas of the world, remade anew by the clarity that is genius and the special twist of thinking that lifts idea to art.

Finding life anew, that seems to be the main thing. Only the methodology changes, and with it, at last, much more realistic chances of success. When one leaves behind the considerable allure of Hopeless Love. Not but what it’s wrenching, tell the truth. But the accoutrements with which one then begins to furnish a life, those fine little fires twice warm the self. Rather like cutting your own wood.

Take this line from Dalrymple. Take it and clasp it to the area of your heart, if you would protect against the great loss, the democratic diminishment of experience.

” … there should always be things that cannot be said in polite company. This is not prudery: it is prudence, for only thus can the most valuable of human experiences be preserved.”

NEW YORK Reuters Health – Continuous treatment with an oral contraceptive combination of levonorgestrel and ethinyl estradiol LNG/EE can safely eliminate menstruation in most women, according to study results appearing in the medical journal Contraception.

The bane of my fucking existence since I ten years old, until some hippie OB-GYN told me that in Europe they take their hormones every day.

And then there was that article in …  The New Yorker? I want to say The Atlantic, but I don’t really want to, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

It was about the Pope—follow me, here—and how the inventor of the pill invented the idea of inducing (that’s all it is) monthly periods so as to seem more “natural.” To the Church? To the Church Fathers? Slice me an unending break.

Fuck ‘em all. For having a single thought of a say-so in women’s suffering lives, never mind the great gasping tragedy of Latin America, never mind that this is the Modern Age, pious bastards. Because they have no business in my sex life or married life or womb, nor anyone else’s. Hey, I don’t go around trying to control how and who and when popes and cardinals and presidents fuck—not but what men might give the subject a tad more thought—and the slightest objectivity reveals how truly bizarro …

Let us not Accept, Oh Lord, that which is Bizarre and Horribly Misbegotten, Resulting in the suffering of Women and Children, Just Because It Is So Widespread it Almost Seems Normal.

Amen.

Black holes present a very interesting dilemma to physicists. On the inside is matter of some sort which must be in some configuration, but because gravity is so strong we cannot glean any information about the internal state. However, this also presents a couple of problems: If a black hole has no internal states, then dropping a box of gas into the black hole should result in a net decrease in the entropy of the universe—violating the second law of thermodynamics. If the black hole does have internal states and thus entropy, these cannot be seen from the outside since general relativity demands that the horizon be smooth. Yet we also know that black holes glow (called Hawking radiation) due to particles being produced in pairs at the event horizon. One particle with negative energy falls into the hole, the other with positive energy is radiated away from the hole. Thus the amount of matter in the hole goes down and energy is conserved. These particles are entangled (i.e., their quantum states are inextricably linked) yet as the black hole decays away to nothing the radiation is, in the end, entangled with … nothing. This, combined with the smooth event horizon is paradoxical since we know that quantum mechanics conserves information, yet here information appears to be destroyed. Whenever paradoxes arise in physics it indicates we don’t know something, and in this case that is probably quantum gravity. The reason Hawking and others have been able to predict so much about black holes is that everything happens on the event horizon, where the curvature of space is small and quantum gravity is expected to be irrelevant. Read the rest of this entry »