Author Archives: Jendi Reiter

Poetry by Raheem Rahman, the Caged Guerrilla

Raheem Rahman, an incarcerated writer in Maryland, recently wrote to us at Winning Writers about his podcast The Caged Guerrilla. Rahman’s twice-weekly show discusses prison life, urban culture, self-improvement, and activism. He’s a raw, dynamic speaker who understands how “prison reform” requires radical change in the power structures outside the prison walls. In one letter to me, he said:

A lot of us did not know that we possessed this talent or even this intelligence until we were put into these type of situations that forced us to reflect or put us into a situation where we can be taught or have the opportunity to learn.

In a way, it makes it sound like I’m advocating for prison but I’m not. I’m saying that if these men and women were granted these opportunities before we got here. It could have saved a lot of heartache and maybe even lives. Furthermore, these talented and intelligent people could have been a benefit to society. A lot of us still can if people get out of their preconceived notions.

Rahman has kindly permitted me to reprint two of his poems below. For more of his writing, check out The Caged Guerrilla, his book based on the show.

A Man Apart

I find myself
(As of late)
Talking to myself
As if there’s no one else
Around to listen
Yet, I’m surrounded by many…

How could this possible be?

Can the stalk
In the field
Surrounded by his brethren
Not find an ear to bend?

Has life become so entangled?

****

Free Me

Locked down, held down, pain now
Heart about to bust.
Love lost, heart constrained.
Foundation crumbled to dust.
Minutes gone, time wasted
Still the situation is the same.
Money’s tight, things aren’t right
Guess who gets the blame.
Mouths to feed, people in need
Nobody to pick up the slack.
Losing all hope, sense of direction
Brains about to crack.
Can’t catch a break, no matter what’s at stake
Still end up losing ground.
Can’t find an out, no matter the route
It all ends up going down.
Irregardless of the cost, I’m tired of the lost
Need something to set me free.
Hand me a map, place a key on my lap
Dear God, please release me.
From life struggles, heartaches
Prison and pain.
From pandemic, poverty, ignorance
And the mentally insane.

April Links Roundup: A Recipe for Transformation

Tonight being the first night of Passover, let’s start off with Rachel Meirs’ graphic memoir “Ruth’s Kitchen,” published in Jewish Currents in 2021. It reminded me of a 1960s cookbook that my husband’s paternal grandma passed on to me, shortly before she died. (This was when I still had time to cook.) The recipes leaned heavily on frozen and canned ingredients, still considered a gee-whiz novelty rather than a target of hipster disdain. Pre-packaged ingredients must have felt like a promise that our moms and grandmas could have it all–a modern woman’s freedom from drudgery as well as the tradition of nurturing our families in the kitchen. Tonight, my mom-of-choice, who taught me to cook, will host a small seder with supermarket rotisserie chicken and non-alcoholic fancy grape juice for our friend in 12-step. Togetherness is what counts.

Liberation is on the menu for us pandemic transitioners. At LitHub, Rafael Frumkin’s essay “The Beauty of the Trans Body” pays tribute to the transmasculine elders who showed him the way forward when his chest dysphoria became comprehensible to him during 2020 lockdown.

Breasts always seem to belong to everyone but the wearer. Freud tells us that infants’ polymorphous sexuality is first expressed through their oral attachment to the breast, leading them to identify their mother as their first external “love object.” Media tells us that breasts are among the most important thing any woman can have, and that they should be full and perky and grabbable. Breasts nurture infants, feed sexual desires: nipples are sucked for both milk and pleasure. One can start to feel like a Christmas tree, branches sagging with ornaments for others to ogle and touch and break.

(All the love to my husband, who sent me this article shortly after my surgery–because even though we live in the same house, we communicate through screens like a pair of nerds.)

Hat tip to poet friend Lauren Singer, on whose Facebook page I discovered the artist Shona McAndrew. This Vulture article, “An Artist Reckons with the Fat Body,” profiles McAndrew’s sensual, dreamy series of nude self-portraits.

“As a fat woman,” Shona McAndrew explains in the catalogue for her new show, “I came to believe that I didn’t deserve intimacy, shouldn’t express happiness in the presence of others, and certainly shouldn’t be proudly showing my large naked body to anyone.”…

In Too Deep depicts McAndrew guiding the finger of her lover into her belly button as she fondles one of her breasts. Flesh abounds, falls, forms a landscape. She peers down the visage of her own body while withdrawing into her psyche. The penetration echoes Jesus guiding the finger of Thomas into his open wound.

Hold You Tight features a seated McAndrew as she embraces Stuart, her partner, who is standing. Her eyes are closed; she seems to be partaking of a world of sensual and spiritual sustenance — like she’s savoring the first taste of something she’s denied herself until now.

In Harvard Magazine, Lydialyle Gibson profiles the formerly incarcerated artist Jesse Krimes. In 2017, Krimes and Russell Craig co-founded Right of Return USA, which offers artist fellowships to other ex-prisoners. The article showcases the resourcefulness and determination of people who desperately need tools of self-expression, but are denied these materials by the carceral system:

Behind bars, art became his escape. Krimes studied philosophical texts—Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth—and developed new artistic techniques, foraging for whatever creative supplies he could find. He made a series of small portraits using newspaper mug shot images, playing cards, and thin slices of soap. His monumental opus, which took three years to produce, was a 40-foot mural made from prison-issue bedsheets, plastic spoons, New York Times clippings, and hair gel from the commissary. Because the artwork itself was contraband, Krimes had to smuggle it out by mail, piece by piece. “It was almost like sending out pieces of myself out of the prison walls,” he says in the film. After his release, he was able to assemble the bedsheets into a whole for the first time: a colorful meditation on heaven, hell, sin, redemption, and purgatory.

I just loved this flash fiction by Christopher Hyun, “A Taxonomy of Gay Animals,” in Electric Lit. It’s one of those clever pieces that uses humor and surrealism to capture an experience more accurately than literal explanation ever could.

In my world, we have an animal code. It goes way beyond the generic gay bears and gay otters. There are gay fish, gay hippos, and gay raccoons…

Like raccoons, owls are more active at night than during the day. Owls are always asking who. Who’s going to be there? Who’s paying? Who’s lost weight? Who’s more popular? And when you answer them, they act like they don’t care. They can turn their necks almost all the way around. They also eat mice.

You know that guy.

Since April is Autism Awareness Month, whatever the heck that means, I recommend poet Cyrée Jarelle Johnson’s 8-minute TED Talk about “autism neutrality”. Let’s stop scaremongering about autism and treat it as an equally valid cognitive style, with its own strengths and challenges.

After 500 years, the Catholic Church has disavowed the “doctrine of discovery,” which had encouraged European Christians to colonize and convert Indigenous people in Africa and the Americas. (Hat tip to Lakota People’s Law Project for the link.) In the UK newspaper The Globe and Mail, Kent McNeil calls out the “err, that was other people” tone of the Vatican’s course-correction. FYI, papal bulls are like official position papers from the Pope.

Though the Church claims that the bulls were “manipulated for political purposes by competing colonial powers in order to justify immoral acts against indigenous peoples that were carried out, at times, without opposition from ecclesiastical authorities,” the Vatican is wrong to depict itself as being so passive. The bulls empowered Portugal and Spain to further the Church’s Christianizing policy by forcibly acquiring the lands of Indigenous peoples and subjecting them to the control of the Catholic monarchs of these countries.

The 1455 bull Romanus Pontifex, which relates to West Africa, is one document mentioned in the statement. In that bull, Pope Nicholas V asserted that, as successor of St. Peter and vicar of Christ, he had a responsibility to Christianize the world. Toward this end, he authorized King Alphonso V of Portugal “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed,” seize their property, and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery.”

The 1493 bull Inter Caetera, authorizing Spain’s colonization of the Americas, starts by asserting that the highest-ranking work of the pope is that “the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread, that the health of souls be cared for and that barbarous nations be overthrown and brought to the faith itself.” After praising King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella for recovering “Granada from the yoke of the Saracens” and for discovering lands previously unknown to Europeans, Pope Alexander VI’s decree purports to grant the Catholic monarchs “all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances, all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered,” west of a line in the Atlantic Ocean from pole to pole 100 leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde Islands. The stated purpose of this grant is religious – namely, to spread the Christian faith and convert the inhabitants of these distant lands.

Colonization was not an accidental distortion of Church doctrine but an official policy. But I guess when you pretend to be infallible, it’s hard to repent.

March Links Roundup: Klaus Nomi Transition Goals

Serving 110% of that futuristic homosexual decadence, baby:

I discovered the late great Nomi via Kristine Langley Mahler’s March Fadness essay on Taco’s cover of “Puttin’ on the Ritz”. Nomi was a gay German countertenor who fused electronica and opera with space-age vaudeville effects. Sadly, he was one of the first known figures from the arts community to die of AIDS, in 1983. Here he is again in one of my favorite Bowie songs, “The Man Who Sold the World”.

This new Gucci ad starring Elliot Page, actress Julia Garner, and rapper ASAP Rocky as a happy throuple dispelled my last doubts about my upcoming top surgery.

LitHub reports on a recent open letter sent to the New York Times by 200+ contributors protesting the newspaper’s anti-transgender bias.

The letter, which presents a damning and deeply disquieting case against the Times‘ coverage, alleges that there has been “over 15,000 words of front⁠-⁠page Times coverage debating the propriety of medical care for trans children published in the last eight months alone.”

It goes on to reference several prominent Times op-eds and investigative features which have “treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources,” and which have actually been cited by Republican lawmakers in their efforts to pass anti-trans legislation.

Signees of the letter include dozens of prominent journalists and regular Times contributors, including Ed Yong, Lucy Sante, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, Carmen Maria Machado, Alexander Chee, and Jia Tolentino.

Read and sign the letter here, especially if you are a NYT subscriber. The Hill reports that the NYT responded that they “will not tolerate” criticism from their own reporters. Free speech, amirite?

Parapraxis is a high-quality new online journal of essays about psychoanalysis from a leftist social justice perspective. In their first issue, I especially liked McKenzie Wark’s “Dear Cis Analysts: A call for reparations”, which describes the anti-trans assumptions in the field’s foundational theories, and Nathan Rochelle Duford’s “What Can Men Want?” Ever seen those tweets making fun of right-wing masculinity posts: “Fellas, is it gay to eat pussy?” Well, Junior Soprano would say yes, and Duford explains why. In hyper-macho ideology, the need for intimacy is feminizing in itself, regardless of the object’s gender.

When authoritarians admit of desire at all (including the presumably traditional desire for a genital sexual relationship between a man and a woman), they open up the radical possibility of a sexuality that includes potentially anyone and everyone, any and every bodily or psychic satisfaction from pleasure to pain and whatever lies between or outside them. This also breaks open the possibility of new forms of relationality, of intimacy, of friendship—it presents us with potentialities for social relations that are different or other than the regressive traditionalist fantasy that authoritarians hold of a normal family in which all desire can be fulfilled. As a result, fascism requires a set of seemingly confused norms surrounding gendered sexualities that begin to expand to include all elements of life, not just genital sexuality…

…As Lacan puts it, “man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” It isn’t only desire for the other, but desire of what the other desires—when one desires, one desires recognition in and through the other’s desire. From this provocation, we arrive at a doubling of lack and insufficiency. Admitting of desire, to want at all, is also admitting to insufficiency and an insufficiency we will never be capable of fulfilling for ourselves. We can see here the organic connection between the idea that having sex with women is gay and the idea that men should not masturbate. In each case, sexual desire, especially in its fulfillment, demonstrates the absence of completeness and the presence of need. This need for the other (even in fantasy) is a fundamental form of weakness because it’s possible that it won’t be fulfilled, showing the insufficiency of the person in need. In both cases, sleeping with women and masturbating (what you may think of as typical straight-guy activities) are demonstrations of a failure of self-control. This is a true failure for the authoritarian because if we have to desire, at the very least we should be in control of it, rather than guided by it. Each of these seemingly normal activities is actually an admission of failure…

…[F]for the fascist (or protofascist) man, sexuality is experienced more as an attack on sexuality itself rather than an expression of desire. The erotics of authoritarian desire are thus short-circuited, routed instead toward hatred for what is outside, destruction of the body of the other, and brutality toward difference. The rejection of a desire for difference, as a rejection of desire, full stop, can be read through all kinds of authoritarian urges to expel, exclude, or annihilate.

In Columbia’s alumni magazine, meanwhile, journalist Heather Radke explains why Nature likes big butts and cannot lie:

 I hadn’t realized that we are the only animals that have butts—that this particular set of muscles is a uniquely human feature. I had always thought of humans as inferior runners and was taught that standing upright and using tools were the keys to human evolution. But Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard and the go-to guy on butts, believes that the unique way that humans run was actually an important factor in our survival. Humans are slower runners than four-legged animals, but thanks to the butt, we have something they do not—endurance. The gluteal muscles are the largest muscle group in the human body, and their strength and positioning are what allowed humans to keep running and chasing prey when other animals had to stop. That endurance gave humans a competitive advantage that became crucial to how we were able to survive and acquire the calories necessary to maintain and develop our brains.

Radke’s cultural history of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s favorite body part, Butts: A Backstory, is available from Simon & Schuster.

 

 

The Poet Spiel: “interpretive solo”

This enigmatic character study by The Poet Spiel brings up some questions that are never far from my thoughts. When does ritual become neurosis? Can compulsion ever cross back into something sacred? The observers’ tenderness towards the solitary man in this poem suggests that his strange routines have summoned some blessing after all, though maybe not in a way that he could expect or notice.

interpretive solo

this red-faced man
stoops his shoulders
as if to keep his heart
from view

he dabs his pointing finger
into his wasting cola
then presses it
against the center of his chin

to create
a sticky dimple
then reaches downward
with his tongue to lick it off

methodically
he fishes thru his pockets
for those same old books
of paper matches

and lines them three across and
three down then flips their covers
then repeats the sugar dimple
lick-it-off stoop-his-shoulders

as in a prayer to wendy
his goddess of this hamburger joint
where i find his bicycle
and his helmet chained and locked

every noon tending
to this sacred business of
three cups of ketchup
a double wendy burger phasing cold

no tomato just the bottom bun
wipe his palms on his knees
never let the bun touch the matches
fold them toward him

sequences no one knows
except there is a perfect way
and if he gets it wrong
he puffs his lips his face

turns redder than his ketchup
and his shoulders nearly meet
until the puffing
and the redding disappear

then he returns to the counter
where the cashiers know his name
and they know no tomato
and not to bother

with the top bun
on the double burger
he will leave
to waste

February Links Roundup: Sims and Saints

Happy February! Tomorrow is Imbolc, the midpoint between winter and summer. Of Celtic origin, the name means “in the belly of the Mother” because the seeds of spring are germinating in Mother Earth.

At Reiter’s Block, every day is trans awareness day. EA Games came out with an update to The Sims 4 yesterday to make my favorite game even queerer:

Top Surgery Scar

Under the same Body category, all players can find a Body Scars category with an option for Teen and older male Sims (masculine or feminine frame) to add a Top Surgery Scar to their Sims.

Binders and Shapewear

With this update, players can find two new assets in Create a Sim. Under the Tanks, in the Tops category, you will find a Binder top asset for your Teen and older Sims. In the Underwear category for Bottoms, there is a new shapewear asset for your Sims as well!

They’ve also added hearing aids and glucose monitors so you can create realistic characters with disabilities.

At Medium, Jude Doyle surveys transmasculine “Patron Saints”, from medieval monks assigned female at birth, to Pauli Murray, “the first Black person assigned female to be ordained to the Episcopalian priesthood.” Doyle notes that the cloistered life was far from a perfect refuge for gender outlaws. It’s good to know that people like us existed, and were considered holy, but we shouldn’t romanticize the compromises they had to make.

Escaping into the church was a privilege, and a gendered privilege at that; we know of dozens of transmasculine monks, but there are no transfeminine nuns on record. Trans girls who ran away from home, fleeing “bandits” or marriage or parents, did not have this option…

At Salon, feminist writer Amanda Marcotte is following the unfolding story of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s book bans.

[T]eachers in Manatee County, Florida were told that every book on their shelves was banned until otherwise notified. Failure to lock up all their books until they could be “vetted” by censors, teachers were warned, put them at risk of being prosecuted as felons.

The facts of this situation are straightforward: A Florida law signed by DeSantis requires that every book available to students “must be selected by a school district employee who holds a valid educational media specialist certificate,” in most cases, the school librarian. This may sound reasonable on its surface, but as the situation in Manatee County shows, in reality, it’s about creating a bottleneck preventing books from getting into the hands of students. Even more importantly, it’s about establishing the idea that books are inherently dangerous objects, to the degree that no student can be allowed to handle one without heavy-handed surveillance…

…In Duval [County], a principal warned teachers that allowing students to read books could result in felony prosecution.

Marcotte perfectly sums up the philosophy behind censorship:

Authoritarians hate reading for the same reason they hate sex, or any private behavior that allows people to experience thoughts and feelings outside of the authoritarian’s control. Learning to sit quietly and read by yourself is, for most people, the first step towards being able to sit with your own thoughts.

Go make Ron DeSantis mad! Read Electric Literature, a smart online journal edited by (gasp!) a Black trans woman, the fantastic Denne Michele Norris. Some pieces I’ve enjoyed recently include Benjamin Schaefer’s essay “We Need to Talk About Professional Jealousy” and [sarah] Cavar’s poem “My Autism Has a Mighty Appetite”.

In the December 2022 issue of The Baffler, Kristin Martin offers an unsettling exposé of Christian foster care influencers. “Wards of God” describes the latest iteration of the colonialist project to “rescue” children from marginalized communities and use them as props for white evangelism. Two-thirds of kids in foster care are there because social workers found parental “neglect,” a broad term that includes the effects of poverty on families with no abuse history. Instead of helping the whole family achieve stability, the foster care system is geared toward child removal. Foster parents receive payments while birth families have to meet draconian requirements to see their children again, let alone reclaim them. Most children characterized as “orphans” by Christians with a savior complex have living parents who were either struggling to meet their material needs, or deceived about the permanent nature of international adoption. “Scrolling through evangelical foster momfluencer accounts, with their testimonials about how God gets them through the hard seasons of care, and how they get too attached to the children in their homes, you can almost forget about the families on the other side: families that didn’t need to be policed and broken apart in the first place,” Martin concludes.

Hilarious gay advice columnist John Paul Brammer a/k/a Hola Papi! has excellent counsel for a queer writer stuck in a pearl-clutching peer group. Read his latest Substack post, “I Hate My Writing Group”. (Sorry Papi, I don’t know how to add the upside-down exclamation point in this blogging platform.)

Incuriosity is thriving at the moment. People seem incredibly proud of publicly renouncing critical thinking in favor of asserting a frustratingly simplistic “thing good or thing bad” mindset…

Worse yet, we’ve come to think of art—all art—as commercial goods that warrant this calculation of the “Moral Nutrition Facts” to ensure we’re not feeding anything “bad” to our brains. So we arrive at a place where art is constantly screaming its own virtues at us. All the rough edges get sanded away, and the lines between “good person” and “bad person” are boldly drawn with one of those ridiculously large Sharpies in mass-produced, infantilizing literature that reassures us that we are good people for putting it on our shelves.

Archives can be subversive. As DeSantis and his fellow authoritarians know, erasing a people’s history makes them isolated and vulnerable to political elimination. I recently had the privilege of touring the David Ruggles Center, an abolitionist history museum in Florence, MA. Their Black history library is available for on-site use only, since their all-volunteer staff can’t keep up with running a lending library. I was sad that all this knowledge never reaches the average middle school or high school classroom. Heck, I went to expensive private schools and colleges in liberal cities and didn’t learn most of the stuff I’m discovering from The 1619 Project on Hulu.

At Nursing Clio, a blog about social justice issues in gender and medicine, Amanda E. Strauss writes about being the director of a new archive about childhood sexual abuse at Brown University’s John Hay Library. The project was barely underway when COVID lockdown hit, Strauss’s father died, and she recovered her incest memories.

I disclosed my truth – “I am a childhood sexual abuse survivor” – one by one to the colleagues and students working most closely on the collections. I led discussions on ethics and spoke with the voice of a well-trained archivist, a confident leader, and that of a survivor. It was the practice of years that kept me going during these conversations as my vision tunneled and the room began to tilt. As during the early months of COVID, the careful boundaries and personas I created to partition my past from the present and my personal from the professional evaporated, and the ground shifted under my feet. I would later learn the clinical word for this phenomena – integration. I like to think of it as healing.

Hot Oatmeal Man

So apparently M&Ms has retired its spokescandies after FOX News host Tucker Carlson complained they weren’t fuckable enough:

Woke M&M’s have returned. The Green M&M got her boots back, but apparently is now a lesbian maybe? And there’s also a plus-sized, obese Purple M&M…

M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous, until the moment you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them. That’s the goal. When you’re totally turned off, we’ve achieved equity. They’ve won.

In the Reiter’s Block household we only eat sugar-free transgender M&M knockoffs.

So I really think it’s time we talk about our corporate mascot kinks. What housewife or latent homosexual hasn’t wanted the Brawny Paper Towel Guy to appear outside their kitchen window? (As of 2017, there’s also the lipstick lesbian version, thanks to Georgia-Pacific’s #StrengthHasNoGender campaign.)

Vs. The New Brawny Man | MAKYA MCBEE VS.

Thirsty holes fan fiction just writes itself, am I right?

Every morning, like a good autistic, I eat the same thing for breakfast: a two-egg omelet and Quaker Oatmeal with soy milk. I got to talking with my equally filthy-minded family about the important questions: Who is the Quaker Oatmeal man and can he get it?

According to the website Pop Icon, his name is Larry and he was redesigned in 2012 to be slimmer and more youthful than the fellow we remember from our childhood cereal canisters.

While many have thought the Quaker man was designed after William Penn, Quaker has stated he was chosen due to the Quaker faith projecting “the values of honesty, integrity, purity, and strength.”

Looking pretty good for a guy who made his debut in 1877, Larry was America’s first registered trademark for a breakfast cereal (thus saith Wikipedia). In 1965, a new advertising slogan was introduced: “Nothing is better for thee, than me”.

Come to Daddy…

Pop Icon will lead you down the rabbit hole of researching other classic mascots’ names and backstories. For instance, did you know Cap’n Crunch liked to “sail the milk sea” with a mermaid girlfriend?

magnolia_bulkhead

“Magnolia Bulkhead”…wasn’t she on RuPaul’s Drag Race?

Another staple of our household diet, 90-second microwaveable rice packets, no longer bear the smiling face of “Uncle Ben” since the 70-year-old brand changed its name to “Ben’s Original” during the anti-racist reckonings of 2020. Aunt Jemima was retired by parent company Quaker Oats in 2021 for the same reason. The brand is now called “Pearl Milling”. The website Organic Authority explains the offensive stereotypes behind these characters:

The use of the term “Aunt” (and, for that matter, the “Uncle” on “Uncle Ben’s,”) wasn’t familial. Rather, it was a term used for elder slaves that often worked in homes instead of the fields. Using the word “aunt” and “uncle” in place of “Mrs.” or “Mr.” lowered their status with their masters.

The Aunt Jemima brand is now mostly known for its syrup, but it started out as a quick-rising flour, mainly used for pancakes and biscuits. Its popularity exploded, and by 1915 it was one of the most well-recognized logos in the country. It even changed trademark laws to help protect its iconic mascot. Early versions of the Aunt Jemima flour packaging included paper doll cutouts for children that showed Jemima and her family barefoot in old, tattered clothing with an option to make them over in nicer outfits as part of the rags to riches story, further elevating the white savior narrative. Their success only came at the hands of the white founder and customers.

“The character of Aunt Jemima is an invitation to white people to indulge in a fantasy of enslaved people — and by extension, all of Black America — as submissive, self-effacing, loyal, pacified and pacifying,” Michael Twitty, culinary historian and author of “The Cooking Gene,” wrote for NBC News. “It positions Black people as boxed in, prepackaged and ready to satisfy; it’s the problem of all consumption, only laced with racial overtones.”

I can’t argue with the need for an update of these problematic logos. But I hope the endgame isn’t to scrub all images of Black characters from advertising. Could the “Ben” on the rice package (currently not depicted at all) be redesigned as a modern role model, like a Black businessman or chef? Is it even possible, though, to create a non-stereotypical product mascot who’s a person of color, in a racist society like ours?

January Links Roundup: God’s Second Draft

Happy 2023, folks. My resolutions this year are to organize, downsize, and appreciate my resources.

Because even when I was a woman, I didn’t need this many handbags.

Caps for Sale!

R.L. Maizes’ satire piece at Electric Literature, “On the Eighth Day God Attended a Writing Workshop,” imagines giving feedback on Genesis:

Levi, flipping through pages: The beginning was a quite a slog. Does anyone honestly care about the firmament? (Workshop participants shake their heads no.) Maybe just start with the apple incident and give us information about the rest of creation when we need it.

Selena, looking up from her laptop: Is the book supposed to be nonfiction? Because I don’t get how a couple like Adam and Eve who are just starting out can afford to live in Eden when I can’t even make the rent on my Jackson Heights studio.

God: Can I just—

Jason: Sorry, Ya. The Author doesn’t get to talk during the discussion. You’ll have a chance later.

This fantastic erasure-poem from J I Kleinberg in the latest issue of DIAGRAM, “Joining the Academy: A Job-Match Game,” discovers gems in found text. Would you like to attend the “College of better odds” or visit “The Museum of jam”? Perhaps you are qualified to become a “professor of sweaty foot smell” or the “Prefect of Lips”.

Also in DIAGRAM 22.6, this set of illustrations from a 1975 ornithology textbook shows birds multi-tasking by eating a lizard during sex. Their facial expressions suggest they know you’re watching and they enjoy it.

In the Jan/Feb 2023 Harvard Magazine, Nancy Kathryn Walecki profiles happiness researcher Arthur Brooks.

The way Brooks sees it, happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. The “four pillars” that support that trifecta are family, faith, friends, and work.

“Faith is anything transcendent that helps you escape the boring sitcom that is your life,” he says. It could be a meditation practice, time in nature, religious faith, or even playing music (he recommends fugues by his favorite composer, Bach). Work, on the other hand, is anything that helps a person sustain herself and her family. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a passion, but it should be something that makes a person feel useful in the world…

…Americans have an inalienable right to pursue happiness, Brooks says, but are not always good at the pursuit. Instead of putting their energy toward building their four pillars, they chase the four idols: money, power, pleasure, and the admiration of others. “Mother Nature doesn’t care if you’re happy,” Brooks likes to say. “She cares if you reproduce. So, the things we crave are not always the things that are going to make us happy.”

…Most of Brooks’s [Harvard Business School] students have an incorrect definition of happiness when they start his “Leadership and Happiness” class, he says. They tell him happiness is a feeling. “That’s like saying that Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of your turkey. Happy feelings are evidence of happiness, not the whole thing,” he likes to say.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this December article from PsyPost reports that “People with unhappy childhoods are more likely to exhibit a fear of happiness, study finds”.

Aversion to happiness beliefs were stronger among people who were younger, more lonely, and more perfectionist. They were also more common among people who believed in collective happiness, believed in black magic or karma, and recalled an unhappy childhood.

“The results show that people from collectivistic cultures are more likely to show an aversion to happiness than people from individualistic cultures,” Joshanloo told PsyPost. “At the individual level, perfectionistic tendencies, loneliness, a childhood perceived as unhappy, belief in paranormal phenomena, and holding a collectivistic understanding of happiness are positively associated with aversion to happiness.”

Importantly, reporting an unhappy childhood predicted aversion to happiness even after controlling for current loneliness. As Joshanloo explains, “This suggests that traumatic experiences as a child may have a long-lasting impact on the person’s perception of happiness, independently of the individual’s satisfaction with current relationships in adulthood.”..

…“It is worth noting that happiness can be defined in different ways,” the researcher added. “People are far more likely to be averse to emotional definitions of happiness (based on pleasure, fun, and positive feelings) than virtue-based definitions (based on finding meaning in life and fulfillment).”

For myself, I am noticing a connection between my vast amounts of disorganized possessions and my trauma-habit of believing that fulfillment is exclusively located in the future. When you live in a constant state of emergency, pleasure can seem like an unaffordable luxury in the present. The affirmation “I have enough” risks reconciling you to an untenable situation. The line between equanimity and despair is hard to perceive.

Transgender historian Jules Gill-Peterson’s feature “Doctors Who?” in The Baffler (October 2022) finds present-day political lessons in the hidden history of transitioners who bypassed the medical gatekeepers.

Fifty years ago, a small group of women of color boarded a bus in Southern California bound for Tijuana, Mexico. They may or may not have stuck out in the crowd of Americans who crossed the border daily for the cheaper rates on goods and services. Once in Mexico, these women, who had journeyed all the way from San Francisco, walked into a pharmacy, bought out its entire stock of estrogen, and then carefully hid it inside their luggage. Back home, they made straight for the Tenderloin.

These women were trans—poor, many unhoused, and most sex workers who faced unending street harassment from the police, clients, and other Tenderloin residents. They were also the self-appointed doctors of their community. In hotel rooms, shared apartments, and sometimes the back bathrooms of quiet bars, they resold and administered the estrogen to their friends—other trans women who could pay in cash for injections. At the turn of the 1970s, this group of ad hoc smugglers and lay doctors were part of a vast and informal market in hormones that stretched along most of the West Coast…

…As the liberal principles of bodily autonomy and the right to privacy are eviscerated, the history of DIY transition offers one path out of the quagmire of zero-sum legal arguments and toward what might come after, or in the place of, state-sanctioned care.

Gill-Peterson describes how institutional trans health care “was explicitly designed to limit access to transition” to those patients who would pass as cisgender heterosexuals after treatment.

As feminists and trans activists struggle against the liquidation of the right to privacy, digging into the connections between DIY transition and DIY abortion is instructive. Both reject how medicalization and the state collude to restrict people’s autonomy. And DIY history suggests that one of the core lessons of trans feminism is that you can steal your body back from the state—not to hold it as private property, but because the state power that polices and punishes your body, just like the doctors who execute its arbitrary policies, is fundamentally illegitimate. DIY treats legitimacy as arising from the people whose lives are most affected by resources and care, not from the abstract power of the state or medical gatekeepers.

The trans liberation activists of the 1970s who dreamed of free clinics were part of a political movement that wanted to depathologize transition, so it was no longer treated as a mental illness or a medical condition that required diagnosis and supervision from clinicians with no vested interest in trans people’s happiness…

…DIY has envisioned freedom in starkly different terms. Instead of pathologizing people to grant them access to medical resources, or relying on the state’s flimsy blessing, activists imagined community-run clinics where people to whom transition matters most would support one another and distribute the care they needed. In that framework, both abortion and gender transition would be something like resources for personal and collective autonomy—means to a life characterized by abundance, not dramatized medical procedures contingent on bizarre criteria of deservingness.

 

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2022

A highly eventful year on the Block!

Made My Bones: My third full-length poetry collection, Made Man, was published in March by Little Red Tree, with cover and interior artwork by friend-of-the-Block Tom W. Taylor a/k/a The Poet Spiel. Solstice Lit Mag calls it “a comitragic, day-glo accented, culture-hopping, snort-inducing, gender-interrogating rollercoaster of a ride.” The American Library Association’s Rainbow Round Table says, “A mix of somber moments and charming wit, Reiter’s collection makes space for humor in the maelstrom of navigating gendered experiences.” Made Man was included in Q Spirit’s list of Top LGBTQ Christian Books for 2022 and was the subject of an essay on later-in-life transition by J Brooke at Electric Literature.

Persia Marie says, “The cover feels nice to rub my whiskers against.”

Reading from Made Man at the Brattleboro Literary Festival. Shirt by RSVLTS; suit by Hart Schaffner & Marx; body by Valley Medical Group Endocrinology.

Big Pussy: I turned my home office into a cat AirBnB for my friends’ fur babies when they go on vacation. The shy and regal Persia Marie is the child of artist and writer Jane Morrison. Check out her website for sublime Greek landscapes, caricatures, portraits and more. Ginger rascals Lorca and Rilke belong to author Michael Bondhus and poet/photographer Kevin Hinkle. If you have a reasonably well-behaved cat that you are willing to deliver and pick up in Northampton, get in touch with Uncle Jendi!

Ginny Sack Is Having a 90-Pound Mole Taken Off Her Ass: The impossible has become possible. In March I had a consultation for top surgery. My surgery date is March 23, 2023. As soon as I can lift my arms again, expect this blog to show way too many pictures of my pepperoni nipples.

My Crew: I celebrated my 50th birthday this July by meeting a dear friend in person for the first time. Friend-of-the-Block Richard Jackson, a/k/a the poet “Conway” from my Prison Letters series, visited us with his loving partner Vanity. We were devastated to learn that Van passed away in a motorcycle accident over Thanksgiving weekend.

Nostradamus and Notre Dame: I graduated from Year One of the Temple of Witchcraft Mystery School. Year Two began this past September. My spellcraft is going a lot better, now that I figured out that I was trying to light the incense holder disk instead of the cone.

Waste Management: Why throw anything out when you can glue it together? I made a lot of collage greeting cards this year.

John Ollom and I will be teaching a multimedia workshop at TransHealth Northampton on May 7. We’ll use collage, bodywork, improvised movement, and journaling to guide participants on a journey of gender self-discovery.

You Know Who Had an Arc? Noah: An embarrassment of riches for best books of the year, as I read three novels that would have been #1 on my list, not just for the year, but in general.

Tara Isabella Burton’s sapphic boarding-school novel The World Cannot Give shows idealistic teens getting their crushes all mixed up with their yearnings for transcendence. The author understands, and eventually the protagonist does too, that sincere passions with life-and-death stakes can coexist with a highly performative, aestheticized selfhood. In other words, you might say it’s a Catholic (or Anglican) book, as well as a very queer one, in that ritual and artifice are the container for authenticity rather than its opposite.

Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a hard-science thriller set in a reshaped geopolitical environment, where humankind’s aggressive harvesting of the oceans for protein may have put evolutionary pressure on octopuses to develop a civilization of comparable intelligence as ours. On a deeper level, it’s a dramatization of different philosophies of consciousness, in which the impossibility of truly seeing through another’s eyes becomes an invitation to rekindle empathy and wonder.

GennaRose Nethercott’s Thistlefoot imagines what would happen if Baba Yaga, the witch of Eastern European folklore (and patron saint of this blog), had American Jewish descendants who inherited her chicken-legged hut. The Yaga siblings–a puppeteer with the power to bring objects to life, and a street performer and thief who can uncannily imitate anyone he meets–find themselves charged with the task of laying the ghosts of the pogroms to rest. Don’t miss the chance to see Nethercott perform a puppet show dramatizing sections from her book. Join her mailing list to find out tour dates.

Bro time with Shane at the Big E!

Poetry by Duane L. Herrmann: “Enlarging the Meadow”

Winning Writers subscriber Duane L. Herrmann emailed me with his latest poetry publications news for our newsletter, and we got to chatting about his Kansas farm and the chores he’s doing to prepare it for wintertime. When he used the phrase “enlarging the meadow,” I suggested it would be a good poem title. Now, here is the poem! Check out more of his work in the anthology Atelier of Healing and the online journals Soul-Lit and I Write Her, among many other venues. His eighth collection, Zephyrs of the Heart, was published this year by Cyberwit.

ENLARGING THE MEADOW

Low bushes invade,
creep into grass,
then additional forbs,
generally called “brush,”
quickly follow.
Their broad leaves,
larger than grass,
encourage tree seeds
to root and sprout,
all causing the edge
of the meadow to move.
After decades it
becomes forest.
To restore supremacy
of grass
all woody plants
must go–back breaking
under hot sun.