Crossroads Dispatches

Women Have Shopping Blogs, Men Have Cool-Hunting Blogs and Other Venus-Mars Petite-Grand Tales

I'm still a little woozy - although I admit I like word woosy better: oozy; wet - from BlogHer. Not to mention hungover from all my deep hanging out excursions to downtown purveyors throughout Silicon Valley in the days preceding and hence. (I hardly imbibe; I'm talking over-stimulation-mental-overload-heady.)

So before I start, I've breathed, ate, drank the 10X return in five to seven years tonic to the point of oblivion. (My career's been primarily in high-tech. And start-ups.)

And so naturally I too disparaged those obviously unambitious women that didn't have a clue about leverage, and scaling. The worse thing you could call one of those women entrepreneurs was....shall I dare?

But don't you dare call her a "lifestyle entrepreneur". Though her original goal was to spend more time with her kids, she is also highly ambitious. In 10 years, she hopes to have a $25 million firm "with New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles on the letterhead," she says. - "Bootstrapping: Lesson 3 Work from Home" story on Small Biz Booster, founded by Yvonne Shortt with $865, Inc. July 2006

"BlogHer blows up"

...is the headline in the Business section of the San Francisco Chronicle. I'm reading that front page this past Friday at the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Company hours before I head over for BlogHer Friday night welcome reception.

I notice a thread at the conference - both in the panels and about the conference itself: we're grappling with with the stay-small-don't-sell-your-soul or monetize-it-baby question. Is bigger always better or is small the new big question. The What is success question. The tug-of-war reflects my own internal state of mind lately.

Friday I chat with Teri Hope, the owner of Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Company, talking about the recent article "Stanford's Boulevard of Broken Beans." As her lease expired at a Simon Group owned mall her Palo Alto Coffee Roasting Company and Cafe Noir espresso bar closed because Simon, whom bought the mall from Stanford University, only wants national chains with national marketing budgets as tenants. Economies of scale, that's Capitalism 101, right?

"Last year, the first BlogHer convention was patched together by three gals and a slow server, and attracted a couple hundred female bloggers.

This year, things have blown up. In a big way."

Patched together wasn't exactly my impression of last year's BlogHer. Blown up has a many connotations too. Author Justin Berton appears to imply BlogHer's the real deal now - what with somewhere on the order of 700 to 800 women attending. Real stalwart sponsors like GM and Johnson & Johnson. Now that's success.

Towards the end of the session "Is the Next Martha Stewart a Blogger?" a web 2.0 male executive addresses the panel (knitting, jewelry, gardening, food): "[Martha Stewart and] Oprah really managed her brand. It sounds like what you are doing are lifestyle business." Egads. Not yet another lifestyle business. You poor dainty creatures, you're thinking small.

Teri Hope is a woman who trekked 100 miles round trip for a cup of North Beach espresso and coffeehouse discourse in the 70's before creating and running her coffeehouse in 1982. And a Hawaiian coffee plantation: "The vision was seed to cup." No, no, no, she explained, to VCs, financiers and franchisers. Small, purposefully.

At the Martha Stewart panel, Margaret Mason observed the scorn given to women points of view and worldviews ("you doing, what, a wedding blog?"): "Women have shopping blogs, but men have cool-hunting blogs...that's ok, we'll be laughing all the way to the bank."

If mommy blogging (and mothering) are radical acts in this day and age, then let's up the ante and be full-blown revolutionaries. Let's operate lifestyle businesses if we want to. (Not just women here: Metrosexuals, LBGTs, men who live/lived in Europe and renaissance souls value lifestyle and lifestyle biz too.)

BlogHer coorganizer and cohort Jory Des Jardins replies on the heels of bloghersphere conversations ("you gals sold out") on "what does it mean, to "sell-out" and the cusp of a decision to play ball or stay small.

Play ball or stay small is not exactly the choice.

It's not about smaller. It's closer.

More intimate. Human-scale over economy of scale. My favorite ease-of-humanness-imbued Web 2.0 companies include women on top: Caterina Fake - Flickr; Mena Trott - Six Apart; and (not technically Web 2.0) Mitchell Baker - Firefox.

Human-scale: Post-industrial, boutique, artisan, epicurean, handcrafted, hand-wrought, warmth, care, attention, devotion.

The big boys want to play boutique too. I glance down at Friday's Wall Street Journal Money & Investing front page: "The agility of a boutique. The reassurance of a global powerhouse." The UBS Global Asset Management advertisement continues to boutique-ize their copy: "agility, innovation, and personalized service."

To see the future of business, walk into a McDonald's in Columbus, Ohio. In that extraordinarily ordinary Midwestern city (trust me -- I grew up there), Mickey D's has begun rolling out a new look, one that owes to more Greenwich Village cafes than to exurban drive-throughs.

As Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin explained recently  "McDonald's is ... transforming its harsh, plastic-heavy interiors into soft, earth-toned places where you might linger with your laptop in an upholstered chair beneath a stylish pendant light."

The Starbucks-ifcation of the golden arches is another indicator of how deeply a design sensibility has seeped into American business. - "Good Investing by Design," Yahoo Finance's The Trenddesk, Dan Pink, July 19, 2006

How quaint, McD's copying Starbucks. It wasn't so long ago that Howard Schultz sat in one of those cozy Milano cafes that triggered the Starbucks epiphany.

Schultz's vision of coffee and community was formed during a trip to Italy in 1983. The espresso bars of Milan and Verona were teeming with people stopping in for good coffee and some company. Bring this to the U.S., Schultz thought, and people will definitely come. - from Sally's Place for food, beverage, and travel

Faun Skyles is opening up a boutique within the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Company boutique - a petite grocery & wine-and-cheese bar where today Teri sells beans and coffee-ware at the coffeehouse "offering artisan cheeses, gourment speciality items, charcuttie, sandwiches and featuring local wines!" Faun was previously the wine and cheese manager at Stanford Shopping Center's [also closed post-Simon] Oakville Grocery.

Faun tells me the reasons she enjoys the personal touch of a small business: "You become part of the community. You know your customer's tastes, you watch their children grow, you set roots down in a place."

Before I leave, Teri brings out her collection of now rare books from her market research days in the early 80s including one called Penny Universities: History's Colourful Coffee-Houses and The Romance of Coffee. As I recounted to a close friend, I left wistfully fantasizing how cute it would be to own a petite literary bookshop with a side salon de thé attached. (I'm a tea gal myself.)

Since there is sooooo many boutique stories and stories about boutiques and my pretty little head doesn't know where to begin or end, I think I'm going to share little vignettes for at least the next week. Tres petite vignettes. Morsels, really: Delicate confections enrobed with a kiss.

vignette

1751, "decorative design," originally a design in the form of vine tendrils around the borders of a book page, especially a picture page, from Fr. vignette, from O.Fr., dim. of vigne "vineyard" (see vine). Sense transferred from the border to the picture itself, then (1853) to a type of small photographic portrait with blurred edges very popular mid-19c. Meaning "literary sketch" is first recorded 1880, probably from the photographic sense.

p.s. If truth be told, the roots thing can freak the Bohemian, vagabond, Americanly-mobile, wanderlust restless side within me. Closer, not necessarily smaller, may mean my tendrils will be inextricably linked and enmeshed in an intricate, inextricable, committed tenderly beautiful pattern.

p.p.s. Maybe woosy is right word when you are weak at the knees because of the charming allure of women's objects of sociability (woos-y: ooze, wet)? And Faun Skyles' Los Gatos Gourmet is tentatively opening September 1st. Don't worry you'll be hearing more...I may most possibly be hosting salons there.

images 'At the Cafe Chaland' and 'La Patisserie' oils by artist Hilarie Lambert. Middle painting: 'Conversation - Terrasse de la Salle Empire - Hôtel de Paris - Monte Carlo' by Gueorgui Chichkine.

Divergent Voices: Take Yer Blinders Off

Maybe it's standing in line for hours at the Indian consulate this morning that's compounding it, but I'm peeved.

I see that Yvonne's been invited to attend (not speak) at an innovation forum. Gee, the "voices of innovation" in a "world" innovation forum are 100% male and white. I'm not sure what obscure corner of the purported world they live in but it doesn't even begin to represent my own neighborhood where even I'm the minority: I  can have dim sum and jasmine milk tea with pearls at just about any shop. At the local Starbucks I spot the students checking their email.

In Chinese.

That 50% of the population isn't represented on stage is appalling in light of the fact that much innovation is totally missed in the early "fuzzy front end" phase of customer insight because we tend to only talk and glean insight from people just like ourselves.

I'm not simply talking gender either. Not only do you need diverse voices on an innovation forum, you need divergent  voices (you can easily find token Hispanics or whatever ethnic minority you want that will validate your own point of view; the key is finding the mavericks, or the lunatic fringe as The Anatomy of Buzz authors call the innovators).

This is a good time to highlight two event organizers that do get it: Fortune Innovation Forum (a very rich, diverse blog; for instance check out interviews with Niti and Yvonne) and Corante's events (disclosure: I'm in the Corante Marketing Hub). And I know that John Winsor actively sought diverse innovators outside his buddy circle - he asked me for recommendations for interviewees - in his recent book on innovation: Spark! Be More Innovative Through Co-Creation.

In a similar vein, Susan Mernit's praises: "Ryan Blitstein's done a lovely job profiling Craig Newmark in SF Weekly" but criticizes the fact: "that every single person mentioned or quoted in it--except for Craig's unnamed girlfriend--is male."

Ryan comes to his own defense in Susan's comment stream: " I didn't call Chris Nolan (or Xeni or other [female] bloggers) because this wasn't a story about blogging -- it was about Craigslist and citizen journalism."

Alas this comment speaks volumes: Clearly, he has no idea what citizen journalism is.

I'm not even sure this particular issue is a diversity issue as much as the ever-looping amateur vs pros issue. It seems to go broader, wider. A man that's not a "professional" journalist that starts blogging in a journalistic fashion would just as likely be dismissed as merely tinkering with his nice little bloggy hobby too.

OK, I admit it maybe I'm peeved because my own mother calls me while I'm driving back from the consulate to reconsider why I have to take on this solo backpack journalism project and risk my life (that's her interpretation). A woman traveling entirely alone to all those bird-flu countries?!?

"There's plenty of ongoing coverage of the tsunami," she chimes.

Name one you read recently I counter. "Well, I saw that supermodel - what's her name - interviewed on TV. She said that things were progressing quite nicely or something like that."

Ah, I can see I have my work cut out for me.

Bonus: Tom Asacker's article "Clarity: Marketing's New Task". He breaks down the 'task' into two steps: Discover and Execute. Many of us blow it on one of these (or both). IMHO, discovery hinges on open-minded curiousity. Fav quote: "Note: Market research rarely reveals new insight into value creation."

p.s. Susan and BlogHer have started nice collection of female media voices in their comments and links. Other citj voices: Mary Lou Fulton (I'm not sure if she's still at the paper, but she's told me privately that classifying "citizen" journalists differently was belittling to their efforts) of Bakersfield's Northwest Voice (see also OJR piece) was an early pioneer of citizen journalism as an offshoot of a traditional paper.

Plus there's a couple female members in the Online Media Bloggers Association. (BTW, zero out of 19? Corante could use at least one media voice in the hub.)

tags social media citizen journalism journalism blogging brands marketing innovation customer insight ethnography diversity marketing

Classic BlogHer Inspired Quote

This is too funny to pass up:

"The percentage of political blogs which I can depend on for real information is probably much lower than the percentage of knitting blogs with real information." - Dan Goodman (via Kevin Drum)

BTW, Kevin I've already harped quite enough about my perspective (echoes many but certainly not all women's view) that the "personal is political."

BlogHer Takeaways: All the Maps Change When...

"Anytime you play by the rules, women check themselves at the door," says Charlene Li, Forrester Research,in the opening debate, Play by today's rules, or change the game? at BlogHer.

When the BlogHer conference was proposed in March, Charlene wrote: "Quick – name me five woman bloggers. You probably came up with Wonkette, and if you’re reading this post, you’ve got me on your list." So if you wonder what the debate is all about and why it matters, then take a gander at the August 2005 issue of Wired for starters: 10 Years That Changed The World. Amidst the nearly all-male roster of "change agents" are Jeff Bezos, Shawn Fanning, Steve Jobs. A slew of the obvious suspects. The Lone Female Mention: Yep, "celebrity" blogger, Wonkette (right now, #20 on Technorati 100).

"We should transcend the rules of the game.... If you pledge allegiance to The List, you're saying that's what matters... The List is too narrow for me," emphasized Halley Suitt. (Live blog of debate session...) With all its gender focus, in actuality BlogHer represented a microcosm of the diversity in the blogosphere more than any other blogging conference I've ever attended. The A-List is narrowly focused when you look at the breadth of the 14 million plus blogs and counting.

Halley harks back to the wee hours of blogging history herself. She brought up 9/11 as a turning point in blogs, in media. In voice. Jeff Jarvis and other bloggers "were talking in a way that no one else was talking [about the event]. Weeks later the New York Times picked up that tone, that language [of blogs]" when they published their September 11th personal tribute essays.

Halley challenge us to kick ass in much the same way Ursula Le Guin challenged young women graduates back in 1986: "...when women speak truly they speak subversively--they can't help it: if you're underneath, if you're kept down, you break out, you subvert. We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That's what I want--to hear you erupting."

All the maps change.

In the morning Birds of a Feather, I was divided (Citizen Journalism, or Storytelling, or) but finally chose the Business Blogging BOF. The more vocal members of the table were convinced that women could not afford to be personal in the big-male-professional world.  Many comments were along the lines of "posting our kid's pictures online would only fuel the stereotypes that we're not serious about work." (Sure sounded like: We must play by the rules. We must speak in the father tongue. We must.) Matt, Yvonne and Renee piped in for erring on the side of "being human." And I: I was uncharacteristically quiet. I was observing. I was musing. Do I push the edge too far in a "business blog"? Am I edging myself out of the game?

Ronni Bennett admits her first blog was anonymous. "It was really bad." In her next incarnation, she openly talks about growing old in a youth-obsessed culture, admits her age, and "didn't pull any punches" on her series on caregiving for her dying mom. The more she shares her story, the more "others pour out their stories; it gives others permisssion to."

Koan Bremner explain why she couldn't possibly have done an anonymous blog. "I'm an advocate. It wouldn't have any credibility if it were anonymous." She shows the audience the back of her T-shirt: Proud to be Trans.  (Not merely not ashamed to be, not O.K. to be, but proud to be.) Proud. To Be.

Heather Armstrong eventually revealed her post-partum depression on her blog: "I felt like I was lying to my husband and to my readers. I've got to tell them." She quips that five years ago, "a magazine wouldn't hire a stay-at-home writing about constipation." She's resolutely certain that "there's going to be more voices and more stories."  (Later that day, I speak to a book publisher that came to meet Heather and to seek out new voices.)

It's taboo to talk informally, colloquially, conversationally, personally, deeply, humanely in the game called the professsional business world. Especially "not done" in public. Thank you, Jory, Koan, Ronni, and Heather for reminding me yet again of the importance of putting our selves forth as ourselves. Reminding me: I'm an advocate too. Me, I'm not compartmentalizing myself. I'm bringing forth my whole self to business. I'm not checking any part of me at the door. (Here's my coming out post.)

We are volcanoes. All the maps change.  There are new mountains.

The title on the panel I was on was Suffragette Journalists...and perhaps we left out the suffragist angle altogether. Suffragist Sojourner Truth wedded together public discourse (the "objective") and the private experience (the "subjective", personal). Consistently I see the personal, the  subjective, the "small" stories of real people discounted and devalued. Yet Sojourner, as Ursula LeGuin shares, welded and fused together the two into a combustible power.

Cathleen Toomey, VP of Communications  Christine Halvorsen, Chief Blogger at Stonyfield Farms, an organic yogurt company oft quoted because of their innovative blogs, also writes for Stonyfield's "Strong Women Daily News" blog. At the closing session, Cathleen Christine said that bloggers escalated coverage of the genocide in Darfur, broke the story of the Alabama woman... "We can fix the world." An obviously belittled blogger passionately responded: "Mommy blogging can be a radical act. It does change people's lives." Amen, sister.

I had a discussion with Elisa Camahort in the car on the way to Renee Blodgett's party last night about the choice of words. Radical? We wondered. Maybe she meant courageous? The more I think about it, the more I realize: Yes, it's radical, revolutionary, map-changing, frame-busting, worldview-warping, rules-breaking.

Although Marc's heart is in the right place, his suggestion that BlogHers create our own list, our own companies and tell the guys to fuck off...is ultimately simply playing the game by the same old (tired, not wired) rules. (Guys aren't the real issue; it's the metaphors we unconsciously live by, the worldviews embedded in the games.) Marc's Implicit Assumption much like August issue of Wired: You only change the world when you are on a list. You only change the world when you are heading a company. Bigger is better. Louder is more impactful. Celebrity matters. [Take this little quiz for alternate view.]

The most misunderstood  quote in the world must be Gandhi's: "Be the change you want to see in the world" and "My life is my message." Yet, I see identity bloggers, mommy bloggers, and many others living out these mantras day by day, post by post.

Jay Rosen wraps up his impressions at the closing session (from my notes): "I've said that blogs are first amendment machines. That blogs are a form of freedom. Now I understand that a bit more [as a result of attending BlogHer]. Instead of press working on our behalf, we do it ourselves... Instead of succumbing to the age of terror we live in - from stalkers to fear of potent reactions - we're meeting it, going on anyway."

We are volcanoes. All the maps change.  There are new mountains.

Yesterday a.m., I grabbed a notebook and jotted a list of bullet-points three pages long of what I wished I had said at the Suffragette Journalism panel (live blogging of session...).

Much of it bounces off Amy Gahran's question: Is personal narrative journalism? (I propose the Technorati tag 'suffragette' to keep the discourse going as I'm only getting started.) As Liza noted at Saturday's dinner: "The personal is political." Thus, I'd wager it's journalism too.

Melanie McBride chimes in: "blog content is blog content: not news content, not journalism, not anything else. therefore it shouldn't be measured against old media. we're not trying to be journalists, we're not looking to speak for *everyone* and many of us are not looking to *cover* all sides. just our own voice, our own perspective and that's it." And "'personal' isn't a dirty word." That's right, who am I to be journaling, story-telling, sharing a perspective? And Courtney wonders aloud why she finds it difficult to enroll "citizen journalists" to engage in the process?

The personal is news when the San Jose Mercury News told it. When I spoke to ABC TV, now that was journalism. When speaking in my mangled, broken Spanish into a camera held by a Telemundo reporter: that was reporting. Better than anything I could possibly say myself in my own words in my own blog. So much better than the stories of the people I met myself. My first-hand experience with American diplomacy, er bureaucracy, echoed and foresaw the miniscule amounts initially pledged to the tsunami-struck countries. We'd called the embassy twelve hours after the tsunami: "Nope, we're not dispatching anyone out to Phuket." Meanwhile the Swedish ambassador herself is making rounds in my hospital room. No U.S. embassy resources to help in Phuket; meanwhile festive flyers recruit helpers for the embassy's New Year's Party...but I digress.

We are volcanoes. All the maps change.  There are new mountains.

Satinder Bindra, New Delhi Bureau Chief for CNN, echoes much of my own thoughts. (He's a real journalist.) When I first met him I did not know who he was. (Although it was a journalism conference so that narrowed the field.)  I'd overheard him speaking to a few folks about a "tsunami book" at the evening reception. Without any introductions whatsoever I jump in and ask, "What angle did you take with the book?" He doesn't hesitate: "The human one." I've heard him speak at the recent SAJA conference. I've read his book (excerpt here; only available in India.) Bottom line: the human resonates. Many children perished in the tsunami. But that fact alone wasn't going to make for compelling TV. Satinder needed one particular story that would illustrate and frame the bigger picture. He found it in Baby 81.

We can debate what's journalism and what's not until we are blue in the face. The fact is TV news audiences are declining. Newspaper circulations are declining. But NPR's audiences are on the upswing. So are blogs. I'm not interested in defining what's journalism so much as understanding what works and why and making an impact. Tsunami news dried up just after Brad and Jen split up. But, the stories haven't.

New York Times op-ed writer Nicholas D. Kristof wrote a compelling piece "All Ears for Tom Cruise, All Eyes on Brad Pitt" (July 26, 2005) beating up the press for neglecting top stories. We're captivated by Tom Cruise and Michael Jackson. I truly believe we could be equally riveted on Darfur given a personal frame of reference. I was struck, just a handful of days after - even in Bangkok - by the remoteness of the tsunami event. It was hard to relate to. What in the world would make the immensity of story come alive for folks half-way around the world? Paradoxically, the particular.

The last thing I wanted to do in Thailand and in January was to be public. (Just too emotionally raw, too much, too soon. I know survivors that couldn't force themselves to watch any footage or pick up a paper for more than a week. In fact, that's something that deserves more airing out now with seven months distance are the tumult of feelings and the sense of acute stress disorder in the first few weeks.). In order to help in some small way with relief funding efforts, I knew that folks needed a personal frame of reference to connect with such a distant tragedy.

We are volcanoes. All the maps change.  There are new mountains.

Quiet subtle profound stories go unreported all the time. Mike Finkel tried to make that point in his new book, True Story. He was black-listed from journalism because he accepted (and agreed to play by the rules) set by his editor (female, too): the idea that slavery in the Ivory Coast was the story he must write no matter what. After digging into the details in the field, he found there was no sensationalistic slavery story. What he found was subtle, profound story on poverty. A story about boys obsessed to leave homes and escape across the borders for piddling wages in cocoa trade jobs. The boys' employers weren't abusers, they were simply dirt poor themselves. They saw a cash-ready market in supplying stories to journalists world-wide: You want slaves, we'll show you slaves. Nope, poverty isn't big enough for the Sunday NYT magazine.

Like many others, I drifted toward journalism partly because it seemed an opportunity to do some good.  (O.K., O.K.: it was also a blast, impressed girls and offered the glory of a byline.) But to sustain the idealism in journalism - and to rebut the widespread perception that we're just irresponsible gossips - we need to show more interest in the first genocide of the 21st century than in the "runaway bride." - Nicholas D. Kristoff, "All Ears for Tom Cruise, All Eyes for Brad Pitt", New York Times, July 26, 2005

At least the runaway bride was an individual. Someone flesh-and-bones we could envision and possibly relate to. As I've written before, this is what the current tsunami coverage resembles: "Phuket has already lost at least Bt60 billion in tourism revenue in the six months since the tsunami ravaged the island together with other provinces in the South. The tsunami’s impact on the tourism industry on the island has led to the closure of over 400 hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops, leaving over 5,000 people unemployed..." Yawning yet? Care yet?

Here's a great example of taking a neglected issue and welding the personal and public on the AIDS drug patent issues. Featuring real stories, personal stories, real individual people.

There's a reason I left J-school in college. It wasn't just that computer science was lucrative. My journalism professor couldn't have made the subject more lifeless if he was offered a million bucks. And while I never thought myself as a "journalist" since I switched majors, I've rekindled a fresh interest in journalism now that we might be changing the rules of the game. Now that map may being blown to bits by the volcanoes reshaping the terrain.

Map changing doesn't happen overnight. I once wrote: "Om Malik is wrong about the demise of the personal blog." My, that was December 8, 2004. You must read what he wrote less than a month later. (I'm eternally grateful for Malik's post-tsunami writing  and chipping in. What he did was entirely off-topic, "simply not done", on an ultra-techie broadband blog. I loved it.)

I think the lights went on for me during the tsunamis, when I began reading the unmediated accounts of people there. Most of which I picked up at a BBC website. It was like music, voices different instruments, harmonizing, such an antidote to the drone of industrial news. (Well, actually the lights went out a couple of years earlier, and started slowly coming back on, but that's a different story altogether.)

So writes a male. With career experience in radio. (Thanks, Brian.)  In fact, it seemed to me that it was men that most resonated with my post-tsunami writing.

Like I said it's not about guys. (As girls can be guard the game rules ferociously too.) Like Halley said "it's about transcending the rules of the game. If you pledge allegiance to The List, you're saying that's what matters." (I've written enough, but links often presume that the ongoing conversation and conversation topics and content are even the one we want to be having, Jeff.)

Thank you BlogHer. Thank you Elisa, Lisa, Jory. I think all the lights went on for me Saturday.

p.s. Nope these aren't even all my takeaways. When I'm erupting I'm even more stream of consciousness writing than usual so I hope this hangs together. I wanted to blog yesterday when I was spurting fresh fiery lava but I was meeting up with BlogHers much of the day and it was good to see that a few BlogHer attendees had enough energy to host a party - thanks Renee for a great time - and to party, Elisa, Mary, J.D.

Update 9:40 PM: I fixed spelling of Koan's name. And spewing lava has cooled a bit. Much helped by an intense chat this p.m. with long-time journalist Staci Kramer, exec editor at paidContent.org. And being reminded by a poet that screaming and crying is cliched and rarely elicits a desired response. In fact that tone makes the opposite point of this post. People lean into a whisper.

Technorati tags:

BlogHer, BlogHerCon, Citizen journalism, Suffragette

And If That Sounded Impractical

I've often been accused of being impractical. OK, how's this addition:

Natalie Goldberg says: "It is the bottom line, the most primitive, essential beginning to writing. The trust you learn in your own voice can be directed then into a business letter, a novel, a Ph.D. dissertation, a play, a memoir." Or Anything. Everything.

Happy?

Writing Whole, Speaking Native

I watched a moth flit into my bathroom window pane. It obviously saw the light of the outer world beyond. The shortcut is straight ahead. Just bang harder. Over and over.

It did not occur to her to fly downstairs and right out the open screen door while I took the laundry down from the clothesline outdoors. There are days... There are lifetimes we insist on seeing just the frame in front of us.

The father tongue breakfast, lunch and dinner is over. A diet of pure pundritry is killing me as surely as I was killing myself in my marriage. It wasn't the marriage per se but whom I was being in it. The tension in the truck was thick that ink-black night. The verdict: I am too slow getting ready. On the road too late. It's all too late. You drive.

I drive. Hours in the deafening silence. Deer were scattered on Highway 89 like bowling pins.

A fawn died that evening.

I've been hungry for poetry lately. (Oh dear she's not going to write poetry on the blog, is she?) Yet the skeleton of poetry isn't necessarily the answer.

Even if it’s true, which I doubt, that the people who bother to “get the news from poems” [referencing William Carlos Williams] die better deaths than, say, their local Cadillac dealers, no one will believe it. Not with poets everywhere hanging themselves, sticking their heads in gas ovens, drinking themselves to death. At this point most people take a miserable death as the mark of the poet. - Michael Lewis, "How to Make a Killing Writing Poetry: A Six Point Plan of Attack",  Poetry, July 2005

In 1929, in A Room  of One's Own, Virginia Woolf proposed a solution to the paucity of women writers: a room of one's own, and five hundred pounds sterling a year. In 1941, Woolf, who had both of those and produced some of the most exquisite writing of the twentieth century, committed suicide.  I am neither Virginia Woolf nor suicidal, but I have come to understand her life and its ending....

Rooms can close you in at least as easily as they can empower you; that the women's movement worries about the outside a whole lot (and that's fine, and necessary), but that what's really held me back is the inside, and no legislation is going to change that.

I have hardly been discriminated against in such a way as to be able to file suit, yet there has been a pervasive and deep discrimination in my life,  in which I have cooperated, in the hope of being loved, and not causing pain. The way to repair the damage this does is not so much by wider opportunities (which make me more conscious of my inability to meet them, and of my own complicity) but by deeper ones - by relationships that carry different values and different pay-offs. I need, we all need, people who will applaud our strengths and forgive us (but not too readily) our weaknesses - most of my childhood it was the other way around. We learn to conform, to mask, to speak softly when we are depressed by our own rage, to assent, and to lie. [A good time to mention I'm inspired to write this post from Shelley's speaking out post. Later in this essay Bolker shares an angry poem about how she really felt at Radcliffe; it was rejected by Harvard Magazine.] Such learning kills our voices, and ultimately our selves. One can stay in hiding only so long, unnourished, without starving to death. And feeding the false self is of no use.

How does a woman grow a voice? - "A Room of One's Own is Not Enough"  (1997),  Joan L. Bolker, essay in The Writer's Home Companion edited by Joan  Bolker

Joan Bolker could better have asked how does anyone reclaim the native tongue? While  Bolker doesn't identify, I understand suicidal. No I'm not. Anymore. But we're masters of slow torture: the drip-drip-drip method.

Bolker continues: "[Voicelessness] is the inability to write or speak our central concerns. Or, to write, but as disembodied personae who bear no relation to our inherent voices: We say only what we think we're expected to say... "

Voicelessness. A rampant infliction. Even in blogs. Even in poetry.

Instead of sticking our heads in the oven can't we imagine other uses for ovens? Maybe baking bread? And follow that with breaking bread? Together? If not the kitchen, can't we gather around the campfire (via Groundhog Day)? Speak the language of mutual admiration for blazing flames?

In the same speech in yesterday's post, Ursula Le Guin says: "As I've been using the word "truth" in the sense of "trying hard not to lie," so I use the words "literature," "art," in the sense of "living well, living with skill, grace, energy" - like carrying a basket of bread and smelling it and eating as you go."

One of the main aims in writing practice is to learn to trust your own mind and body; to grow patient and nonaggressive. Art lives in the Big World. One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters. Too many writers have written great books and gone insane or alcoholic or killed themselves. This process teaches about sanity. We are trying to become sane along with our poems and stories. - Natalie Goldberg, "Writing as a Practice", essay in The Writer's Home Companion edited by Joan Bolker

I haven't seen Enrique in a while. He has a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude on the table at B&N. He's a third through. I smile. Last year you'd only run into him on the business book aisle. Last year you'd only find me on the business book aisle. He tells me he's surprised by how much he enjoys his art history class. I smile some more. In college he survived a bout with cancer. One day a fellow patient groans loudly in the room. Apologetically he explains while hugging his belly in a vice grip: "The ulcer is real bad." Enrique said nothing. He looked his mother. He looked again at the sign. It still read: Cancer Ward.

We are scared that becoming sane as Goldberg suggests is bullshit. Bottom-line insane in this big, bad jungle.

I can only offer more "insanity":

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am.

- Rainier Maria Rilke, "Sonnets to Orpheus," Part Two, XXIX

The native tongue is ancient. So ancient it is in our bones. Though forgotten.

I read Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus. He speaks of the poppy, the symbol of sleep. Oblivion. Death. On the sixth day of the meditation retreat I was bored to tears. On the ninth day of the meditation retreat I rekindled my capacity for awe.

Even in those surroundings I'd manage to begin to sleepwalk in my daily morning hike. Seen those trees, that path, already jumped that steam crossing. The turkey babies were darling maybe the first two times. Now I barely glance at their teetering tawny bodies.

I went on my last hike at lunchtime.

A saffron California poppy struck me dumb. I saw the violet thistles and wild oats rustling through the field.

I am shattered to learn I regularly run past the same type of terrain, the same wild oats, the same poppies on my regular running route in Rancho San Antonio. So where have I been?

Buddha chose for his sannysins [his disciples, the monks] the yellow robe. Yellow represents death, the yellow leaf. Yellow represents the setting sun, the evening. Buddha emphasized death, and it helps in a way. People become more and more aware of life in contrast to death… Three months’ meditation on death, then coming back – that was the beginning of sannyas. – Osho, Buddha: His Life and Teachings

California poppies are cloaked in the same color robes, hooded, of the sannysins before they fully bloom.

If what you write, what you do, who you are being doesn't infuse you with saneness, nativity, naturalnesss, primal wholeness, vitality, life....then...why? Find at least one space where you can. It need not be for the entire public. Nor squirreled away in a room of one's own.

Oh, the bread is ready. Fresh out of the oven. A reader tears a piece from the loaf. Makes some scones. Please, sit for tea...(Thanks, Romy):

"Sometimes I wonder, maybe, just maybe, a connected voice doesn't need to do somersaults."

The painter Ben Shahn said, "The universal experience is that private experience which illuminates the private and personal world in which each of us lives the major part of his life. Thus, in art, the symbol which has vast universality may be some figure drawn from the most remote and inward recesses of consciousness; for it is here that we are unique and sovereign and most wholly aware. I think of Masaccio's "Expulsion from the Garden", so intensely personal that it leaves no person untouched. I think of a di Chirico figure, lonely in a lonely street haunted by shadows; its loneliness speaks to all human loneliness. As an experience, neither painting has anything of the average; both come from extreme limits of feelings and both paintings have great universality."

My thoughts are that the voice of the artist can only be drawn from the more inward recesses of consciousness because it is there where he is more wholly aware. Wholly in the sense that he no longer perceives within the boundaries of opinions, conditionings, memories etc. These are the stuff of the outer layer of consciousness, that is called the "smaller mind" in Zen, the individual or outer self that Jorge Luis Borges once called the "other Borges".

I think that the more wholly aware we are, the more unique the configurations of our experiece would be. We somersault into greater solitude. And yet the more universally connected we would be at the same time. This primal awareness is what we intimately share with everybody. And the artist proclaims this primal and universal awareness by mirroring it on the personal and unique expressions of his art. Allen Ginsberg was talking once about the mind but I think he was referring to this primal consciousness. He said, "If you can show your mind, it reminds people that they got a mind. If you have a vivid moment that's more open and compassionate, it reminds people that they have those vivid moments." I look at Van Gogh's "Starry Night" and I hear his unique voice and I also know that sometime, somewhere I had been aware of life in the same way too.

p.s. This little outpost is Crossroads Dispatches - so the father tongue, mother tongue, native tongue will be spoken here. A few of those languages had nearly gone forgotten, but certainly not extinct.

p.p.s. Sometimes I don't use real names for my friends.

Credits: Flickr photos by eyesofhorus

Mother Tongue

Lisa asked referencing the upcoming BlogHer panel, "Suffragette Journalists - Oped Pages of Our Own" with Anastasia Goodstein, Chris Nolan and moi:

"Is there anything about blogging that is uniquely available to and valuable for *women* writers and readers?"

Just when I thought I was getting the hang of "conversational" media, renowned sci-fi writer Ursula Le Guin illumines something that has been lurking as a continual knocking, knocking that I've nearly refused to answer.

Yes, women can bring more to table. Much more. Read on as Le Guin provides a jolting conversation starter. (I recommend the entire speech...let sink in.)

The truth: the native tongue scares the wits out of me. But that's also the direction paradoxically I'm pulled toward. I don't think it's a coincidence that suffragist Sojourner Truth leads the way here (read on).

Yeah, you might say its our birthright. And not just women's.

The dialect of the father tongue that you and I learned best in college is a written one. It doesn't speak itself. It only lectures. It began to develop when printing made written language common rather than rare, five hundred years ago or so, and with electronic processing and copying it continues to develop and proliferate so powerfully, so dominatingly, that many believe this dialect - the expository and particularly the scientific discourse - is the highest form of language, the true language, of which all other uses of words are primitive vestiges.

It is the language of thought that seeks objectivity. I do not say it is the language of rational thought. Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective thought.

When it claims a privileged relationship to reality, [the father tongue] becomes dangerous and potentially destructive.

Using the father tongue, I can speak of the mother tongue only, inevitably, to distance it -- to exclude it. It is the other, inferior. It is primitive: inaccurate, unclear, coarse, limited, trivial, banal. It's repetitive, the same over and over, like the work called women's work; earthbound, housebound. It's vulgar, the vulgar tongue, common, common speech, colloquial, low, ordinary, plebeian, like the work ordinary people do, the lives common people live. The mother tongue, spoken or written, expects an answer. It is conversation, a word the root of which means "turning together." The mother tongue is language not as mere communication but as relation, relationship. It connects. It goes two ways, many ways, an exchange, a network. Its power is not in dividing but in binding, not in distancing but in uniting. It is written, but not by scribes and secretaries for posterity: it flies from the mouth on the breath that is our life and is gone, like the outbreath, utterly gone and yet returning, repeated, the breath the same again always, everywhere, and we all know it by heart.

It is a language always on the verge of silence and often on the verge of song. It is the language stories are told in. It is the language spoken by all children and most women, and so I call it the mother tongue, for we learn it from our mothers, and speak it to our kids. I'm trying to use it here in public where it isn't appropriate, not suited to the occasion...

Early this spring I met a musician, the composer Pauline Oliveros, a beautiful woman like a grey rock in a streambed; and to a group of us, women, who were beginning to quarrel over theories in abstract, objective language - and I with my splendid Eastern-women's-college training in the father tongue was in the thick of the fight and going for the kill - to us, Pauline, who is sparing with words, said after clearing her throat, "Offer your experience as your truth." There was a short silence. When we started talking again, we didn't talk objectively, and we didn't fight. We went back to feeling our way into ideas, using the whole intellect not half of it, talking with one another, which involves listening. We tried to offer our experience to one another. Not claiming something: offering something...

The third language, my native tongue, which I will never know though I've spent my life learning it: I'll say some words now in this language. First a name, just a person's name, you've heard it before. Sojourner Truth. That name is a language in itself. But Sojourner Truth spoke the unlearned language; about a hundred years ago, talking it in a public place, she said, "I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all." Along at the end of her talk she said, "I wanted to tell you a mite about Woman's Rights, and so I came out and said so. I am sittin' among you to watch; and every one and awhile I will come out and tell you what time of night it is." She said, "Now I will do a little singing. I have not heard any singing since I came here."¹

Singing is one of the names of the language we never learn, and here for Sojourner Truth is a little singing. It was written by Joy Harjo of the Creek people and is called "The Blanket Around Her." ²

maybe it is her birth
which she holds close to herself
or her death
which is just as inseparable
and the white wind
that encircles her is a part
just as
the blue sky
hanging in turquoise from her neck

oh woman
remember who you are
woman
it is the whole earth

So what am I talking about with this "unlearned language" - poetry, literature? Yes, but it can be speeches and science, any use of language when it is spoken, written, read, heard as art, the way dancing is the body moving as art. In Sojourner Truth's words you hear the coming together, the marriage of the public discourse and the private experience, making a power, a beautiful thing, the true discourse of reason. This is a wedding and welding back together of the alienated consciousness that I've been calling the father tongue and the undifferentiated engagement that I've been calling the mother tongue. This is their baby, this baby talk, the language you can spend your life trying to learn...

The complete transcript of Ursula K. Le Guin's address at the 1986 Bryn Mawr College Commencement is here. It's also published in her nonfiction work, Dancing At The Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places.

SEE ALSO:

Women Travel Writers ("At the end of my review of Emma Larkin's Secret Histories I made the comment that this book, along with Anna Funder's Stasiland, "seems to be opening up a new genre (I'm hating myself for writing these words): female writers providing a personal perspective of political troubles; not personal as in their own perspectives, but in that they piece together the histories of the states they're writing about through the stories of those who have lived within it.")

We're All Journalists in the Age of Ordinary Art

The Artistic Gifts of Women Bloggers

There Are Many Ways to Tell Stories