corporations are not people, my friend

THIS IS A PERSON

THIS IS A PERSON

THIS IS A PERSON

THIS IS A PERSON

THESE ARE PEOPLE!

THESE ARE PEOPLE TOO!

THIS IS A PERSON

And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make.

beach

boobs a lot

BOOBS A LOT

Do you like boobs a lot?
(Yes, I like boobs a lot.)
Boobs a lot, boobs a lot.
(You gotta like boobs a lot.)
Really like boobs a lot.
(You gotta like boobs a lot.)
Boobs a lot, boobs a lot.
(You gotta like boobs a lot.)

Down in the locker room,
Just three boys,
Beatin' down the locker room
With all that noise,

Singin' do you like boobs a lot?
(You gotta like boobs a lot.)
Boobs a lot, boobs a lot.
(You gotta like boobs a lot.)

Do you wear your jock a lot?
(Yes, I wear my jock a lot.)
Got to wear your jock a lot.
(Got to wear your jock a lot.)
Jock a lot, jock a lot.
(You gotta wear your jock a lot.)
Got to wear your jock a lot.
(You gotta wear your jock a lot.)

Well, down on the football,
Football field,
You never can tell
What a heel can wield,

So you gotta wear your jock a lot.
(You gotta wear your jock a lot.)
Jock a lot, jock a lot.
(You gotta wear your jock a lot.)

If I had a flag-a-long,
(If I had a flag-a-long.)
If I had a long flag-a-long,
If I had a long flag-a-long,
If you like boobs a lot, tag along

Bee beep, bop, de boob a lot.
(You gotta like boobs a lot.)
Boobs a lot, boobs a lot.
(You gotta like boobs a lot.)

They're big and round,
They're all around.
They're big and round,
They're all around.

REPEAT

The Fugs

The Fugs First Album, ESP 1018, 1966

women and nature

(and to finish off our series of (mostly) american women printmakers,
i offer you....)

“I am thinking of the communion I felt as a child in the Sierra under trees or in fields of wildflowers. I told no one what I felt. In my small world, no one referred to mystical experience, even in the church I attended.

I had not yet read Emerson, nor had I heard the story of how, as a young man, when John Muir discovered a cluster of rare orchids, called Calypso borealis, growing by the edge of an icy pond, deep in the outback of Ontario, he sat down and wept for joy, feeling that he ‘was in the presence of superior beings who loved me and beckoned me to come.’”

Susan Griffin 1

from HOUSE of STONE and SONG

Because we live in a country where
no one I know
sings to God in the streets,
I’m given to wandering past margins of fern and wild honeysuckle,

following the burr of the tanager, that lazy, drowsy
dozy buzz of triple notes
tied close together. I’m tethered and led, legato,

deeper in, beyond cedar field and hardscrabble, through
grapevine, bullbrier,
gloves of rhododendron and laurel lamp-lighting my way

over Indian graves and wetland, hellebore and hummock,
into the tall trees where
that flash of pure fire finds its high-branch summer niche.

Perhaps I want to be the crazy woman
who lives on roots and berries
in the only woods abandoned to her....

— Margaret Gibson 2

GENESIS

Far from the sea, the lilies grow
and listen for the sea.

Long ago, they bloomed near the shore,
and the small crustaceans,
red-backed crabs,
scurried under the pale exotic plants
that rocked on thin stems
half-flower, half-shell.

It’s a long way from the beginning.

The heavenly beasts appear in the sky,
unchanged
since the first seeds fell on the fields
in a green rain,
and men climbed from the water
on two legs,
unsteady as baby goats.

In the wind now
the white flowers rise and bend
in the grass, like the heads of sheep.
Behind the mountains
the waves rise and fall. The stars open.

No one has left the garden.

— Barbara Jordan 3

the chronicling poet

thanks to the work of a handful of poets, trans- lators, and publishers, we have become aware of a number of poets and novelists, women in early japan. now, though, the voices of the diarists are coming through as well.

in Bettina Gramlich-Oka's fas- cinating essay, Tokugawa Women and Spacing the Self , we are introduced to the lives and work of three such women, Rai Shizuko (or Baishi) (1760-1842), Tadano Makuzu(1763-1825), and Iseki Takako (1785-1844). in excerp- ting (dramatically) the essay, i will let each woman speak for herself.

shizuku:












Omou koto ........................ Without a thought,
nakute mimashiya ........................... for a while, I only
to bakari ni ....................................... observe,
nochi no koyohi zo .................... but later this evening
tsuki ni nakinuru ................... I will shed tears under
the moon. (1800/9/13)

o no naka ni ................... Whatever in the world
michi yori soto wa .................................. lies outside
nanigoto mo ................................ the Way,
supporapon no........................................ throw
pon ni shite oke ........................................ away!

makuzu:

My father Heisuke had five daughters. He wished to marry one of them to a retainer [of the Date house], but none of my sisters said she would go. While they feigned ignorance of our father’s hope, one by one their life courses were decided. I realized that if I did not act, my father’s wish would go unfulfilled, so I set aside my own desires and moved to this place.

Having made up my mind, I resolved to return to my father the body he had given me and, resigning myself to my life being over at the age of thirty-five, set out on a journey of no return. There was little to it, I thought, since it was better than the road to death. Whatever hardships I encountered after arriving here, I endured, thinking them better than the tortures of hell. But ever since [my brother] Motosuke left this world, my mind has not been at ease. I wrote this book [Hitori kangae] thinking that unless I pursued my father’s goals, he would have developed his ideas in vain.

As for half-baked scholars, their thinking is full of errors; the more they gather together, the more they argue without producing wisdom. This is the general situation among scholars. In what way do they differ from frogs?

Since I am a woman lacking in knowledge, I have stated whatever I wanted to without a second thought. Please correct my writings according to your judgment.

I have written this entire text without any sense of modesty or concern about being unduly outspoken…With this in mind, I feel neither pain nor irritation at being criticized by others.

takako:

What I am now writing, with my inadequate intelligence and clumsy brush, is not intended to be broadcasted to the world. I am writing this in order to let the young people of my family and their children in future generations know a little of how our family lives today and what our world is like. No doubt these scraps of paper will become the haunt of bookworms or be dragged off by mice for their nests, but even if that happens, it will make a wonderful diversion. (1840/2/12)