In 2006…a four-year jail sentence….On his release…put under house arrest…and for the next 19 months…kept a prisoner in his own home, sometimes severely beaten

As the Chen Guangcheng incident has shown, deciding…to leave China and…exile is an extremely tough call

I don’t know which area [of the hospital] this is

The blind legal activist was adamant…he did not want to leave his country…in the U…S… embassy in Beijing, but….after leaving the secured compound last week

My wife and children are with me. My wife…was tied up in a chair by security officials for two days

Nobel Peace Prize ceremony…Liu Xiaobo, the jailed…empty chair

China’s official press….”the blind masseur” and “the blind peasant masseur”

“out of China’s sight, out of Chinese minds”…afflicted…dissidents of…1989 Tiananmen crackdown

harassed, abducted and severely beaten by security forces

live broadcasts…blacked out by censors as last year’s…

dark day for freedom

“As a disabled man…hasn’t received a higher education…paranoid…”

My wife told me seven surveillance cameras have been installed in our house….There were people inside and outside our house and in our rooms, eating and staying there. They plan to build up electric wires around my house

toxic levels of lead…toys…milk…toothpaste…dog food

artist…set up four live webcams in his home….weiweicam.com

stopped by plainclothes security officers

(Like some other links in this post, you’ll need to use Google translate…that page into English)

leave? The Yankees…

symbolic…24-hour police surveillance

Artist and activist Ai Weiwei turned off four live webcams in his home late Wednesday after Chinese authorities ordered him…down

midnight raids and beatings

died…5000 schoolchildren…poorly constructed schools

my sister went on Wikileaks for a project and she got a call on her cell phone from the government…

illegally detained

why don’t they…why the people…

There’s nothing wrong with profit…way

repeatedly…local security thugs beating him and his wife

I asked them, ‘Is that an order?’ And they said ‘Yes, it’s an order,’”

seemingly away….carved out a…career…investment banker

seemingly w…/w…

I would like to leave

leaders are obviously not…the same page

Other Chinese dissidents who came before the 40-year-old self-taught lawyer….online posts…blocked…reducing them to virtual

unrealistic demands about human rights standards

Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals

unknowns in their homeland

cartoon…blind man…walking into a black hole

But that did not change his future

tangle between two giants

Adrienne Rich

The phantom of the man-who-would-understand,     the lost brother, the twin—            [....]

the comrade/twin whose palm                                           would bear a lifeline like our own:            [....]

merely a fellow creature                                                  with natural resources like our own

I was in high school when I first read these words from Adrienne Rich’s “Natural Resources,” a meditation on gender’s complexities in the classic collection The Dream of a Common Language, itself a longer speculation on identity that I found far outside the main marketplace in the handful of books at a second-hand store. It probably cost me a quarter.

The poem dissects the definitions we accept for men and women and explores the relationship potential of women and men. These particular lines made the type of deep impression that occurs possibly only in those formative years, and I felt an immediate kinship with the figure she describes: a conceptual male—one perhaps forgotten, perhaps foreign, grappling with the sharp weights of existence and freedom—from the past, from a corrupt group version of himself and, importantly, alongsidewomen, the speaking “our.”  Early on the poem served to align my vision of the world as an interplay of individuals as half-formed reflections of an imperfect culture.

Symbolic self chosen by Jeanann Verlee. Sculpture by Sheri DeBow.

“Natural Resources” was written in 1977—two years after I was born, making it all the easier connect it with my own identity. (Like the way events from your birth year somehow become a part of you, though they bear no real relation to you, so One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nestwinning Best Picture in 1975 makes me feel connected to McMurphy and JackNicholson.)

In this section, Rich describes the shadowy, possible male—an inchoate figure struggling for independence among a majority of men who are crude and brutal, and the alternative slice that is passive and ineffective. A lone wolf who rejects the inhuman demands of an unfair society and doesn’t fit in wherever he goes? How could one not find it attractive? Turn the poem into a movie and you have a million dollar blockbuster starring any (male) Hollywood action star versus gender inequality.

In other sections, Rich laments the history of women as back- and battleground, where non-male concerns are simultaneously marginalized and brutalized. Rich’s tone is weary, hopeful, introspective, and communal, and always the potential for equality is played out in real, human terms with real, human lives in mind. This is what separates Rich and other activist poets: the constant recollection of life outside the lab of the alphabet.

Tarot Card "Strength" which contributor Abbe Levine points out features a woman.

This amorphous creature reaches into us and lashes out of us every day in large-scale displays. But arguably, it is in no way more apparent or pivotal than in our intimate relationships, our one-no-one human dealings. How we deal with our fellow women and men as individuals; how we actively define our gender; how we promote or impede equality among the sexes: This edition of dirtcakes investigates some of those issues, interactions, and interstices between gender equality and imbalance, self-esteem and shame, tradition and institutional injustice.

As with each edition of dirtcakes to date, The Gender Issue is a concept issue. Each section is headed by a Janus figure that represents the dual gender principals at work in that section. These figures are the “found” art objects of re-envisioned Barbies: Actual products of artists Melissa Avila and Jill Wade who graciously gave dirtcakes the privilege to further their artistic presentation, the re-imagined Barbies have been photographed by Susan Greene and placed by Catherine Keefe in market projection mock-ups and advertising scenarios as part of a fictionalized new brand. As readers might guess, a Barbie that challenges ingrained social norms isn’t expected to sell well. That is why our new product research has been rescued from the garbage by the cleaning lady.

Dorothy Parker (and dachshund) chosen by Cristin O. Aptowicz.

This fictional night maid is your guide through this issue. Imagine her in the background of the pages. A socially voiceless narrator prompting you with the only language available to her: a half-uttered one, translated from cast offs of the mainstream market that only needs her in the middle of the night. You may even read the poems and essays as her thoughts and reflections as she wanders freely through an institution responsible for much of our collective gender perspectives.

You may read Cristin O’Keefe Aptowitz’s “The Waiting Room of my GYN” as our guide’s gender anxiety, Jennifer Hollie Bowles’ “What’s for dinner, honey?” as the plea of a friend. Eleanor Des Prez’s tributes to her daughter Sophie could be our silent narrator thinking of her own daughter. Hannah Craig’s “Anniversary” could be the night maid’s own. And Danyul Nguyen’s playful “Adrienne” might try to capture her stream-of-consciousness self-definition or be a coincidental tribute to she who started his whole thing.

Lastly, for this issue we asked contributors to send in a symbolic self–an inspirational, actual, past, present, future, fictional, archetypal, or historical woman who represented them–to be featured on the bio page. A few of those choices are featured here.

Click the link to the right to hear The Red Hot Chili Peppers version of Yertle.

And he looked down the stack.

And he saw, at the bottom, a turtle named Mack.

Just a part of the throne. And this plain little turtle

Looked up and he said, “Beg your pardon, King Yertle.

I’ve pains in my back and my shoulders and knees.

How long must we stand here, Your Majesty, please?”

“SILENCE!” the King of the Turtles barked back.

“I’m king, and you’re only a turtle named Mack.”

14 Yertle The Turtle

From the venerated classic Yertle the Turtle, this exchange between the self-appointed Turtle King and his lowest turtle servant illustrates a spirit firmly attuned to the concerns of The Occupy Movement: fairness, equal treatment, selfishness, and the dillusions of power.

Way back in the 1950s when Yertle first made his demands, Dr. Suess proved he understood the arbitrary claims of rule and the consuming greed of the corporate mandate. He proved, in simple terms even a child can understand, that when a tiny fraction of a population benefits so exclusively, and at the physical expense of so many others, that structure cannot last.

A more equitable distribution of life, liberty and the time to pursue happiness has always been our collective aim—a little more room for everyone to dream the American Dream. On Occupy Writers, more than 3,000 figures from letters and counting posted their support of the Occupy Movement, as Dr. Suess did 60 years ago.

They include another children’s author, Lemony Snickett; musical revolutionary Zach de la Rocha; poetic luminescent Anne Waldman; Ursula Le Guin for you old school sci-fi heads; personal teacher and all around wonderful human Gillian Conoley; and many more. My personal favorite is the very first, Francine Prose, who invokes Walt Whitman before she admits to the overwhelming need to weep at the brilliance of the congregation:

…I was struck by how well-organized everything was, and, despite the charge of “vagueness” one keeps reading in the mainstream media, by the clarity—clarity of purpose, clarity of intention, clarity of method, clarity of understanding of the most basic social and economic realities. I kept thinking about how, since this movement started, I’ve been waking up in the morning without the dread (or at least without the total dread) with which I’ve woken every morning for so long, the vertiginous sense that we’re all falling off a cliff and no one (or almost no one) is saying anything about it…I kept feeling these intense surges of emotion—until I saw a placard with a quote from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” And that was when I just lost it and stood there and wept.

Many other sites have cropped up to unifying writers and the 99%, including OccuPoetry. Run by poets Phillip Barron and Katy Ryan, the site invites “poetry about economic justice/injustice, greed, protest, activism, and opportunity.” It is updated regularly and January 9 features a poem by me: “Shadows of the King.”

That girl is a gymnast, he said.
And I asked: How do you know?—
He said he could tell
from the shape
of her body, the size
of her muscles, the way
she moved. I supposed, as I drank
my milk at the diner window,
that like knows like
and athlete to athlete, he saw
in her a kinship that he would
never find in me. I looked up
past the old, dingy windows
on Main Street. The skinny girl,
walking quickly, was gone.
And I felt every pound
of pregnancy on my body
like a deadening barbell
and I wondered if he would
reach for my hand.

—Lori D’Angelo

Anniversary

joy, rag-eyed, soft
as a morning egg,
and still the bottom
falls out of your heart
your thin feet
strange and muscular
turning towards one another
at strong angles

are they yours?
an old woman’s feet
her hands prostrate
over your words
and then again that viperous
joy, that molasses
shout, coming forth
face-up, glowingly
unalarmed

so you grow old
so the new string hums
the same note as the old
all’s well, all’s well
but then, everything’s changed

—Hannah Craig

Untitled (The first time …) from One Hundred Hungers

The first time her thick blood dampened the new moss of her body,

she opened a cloistered inner door to her mother.

Together they watched the alphabet of liquid spill out of her earth,

each cramped syllable spreading into an idiom, a dark and long language.

Her mother taught her to push the storm back

into the throne of her swelling, and later, in the dark,

she tasted the spoil of red on the tip of her finger.

Please stop, she said to the ceremonial force of this cyclamen twirling up

and inverting her center, but each month her insides descended in diamonds

and dashes. A salt-cycle of ornamented sheets and brief regeneration.

—Lauren Camp

three seeds

I waited for the rain her hair river

crows on my body I drink a cloud of hair

handmade in the bed an ocean

out of wedlock our bodies do not break

your neck slit gold from each other

and open

but I once knew who

fear a world where we love in the limb

was called my reflection down-

minted stream.  Handmade, story

I bring out a tree

will cleanse your breath,

again, having

washed myself too many

play the veena if you river again

made of eucalyptus trees.  Think

the dirt may find a home

of the sky, his pronoun

no longer appeared, in flames

and the fish may rest

in graves my body

only a wall of cicadas,

with body to break

what if a lola sky no water can dose

Italicized words from Melissa Sipin, Claire Donato, Hari Malagayo Alluri, Rachelle Cruz, Todd Wellman, Tamiko Beyer, Paul Ocampo, Serena W. Lin & Bushra Rehman.

—Ching-In Chen

Book of Nights

I

Open your book of nights,

unreadable and faded.

The sheets are damp,

your sleep bloated with rain

and the same dream, the one where

you are standing at the window

broken,

picking glass stars

from your wet mouth.

You’ve kept nothing of his

but the unbelieving children

and a faint memory

of shifting bones

But some nights,

the moon’s hard eye holds you

closer, tighter

than your body can bear.

II

He’s been warned

of her sharp white teeth,

the necklace of vertebrae kept

hidden among the underthings.

Her openmouthed kisses leave him raw,

his throat lined with salt.

She is too hungry to be trusted.

Tonight, while she sleeps,

he will fill his heart with stones,

drown it deep.

III

Sleep is not the forgetting it used to be.

You put the kettle on, wash your face,

watch fireflies crawl on the ceiling

till day breaks.

Love has locked you in this body,

fashioned your wings into tired hands

that fall open, suppliant,

on his chest

like dead spiders.

IV

Mine is a magician’s smile

styled with mirrors and smoke,

red wax scrawl, trick of the eye.

At night, when my skin is bare,

I am little more than a question.

I lay still, wait for the one who

will happen upon my true face.

When touched too gently, I say things

only trees understand.

—Danielle Boodoo Fortune

Made of rolled, recycled paper dipped in a scent “by an award winning fragrance company” topped with biodegradable erasers!

This brilliant idea (proof that there are jobs in the green industry) is featured on BuyGreen, which offers a wide variety of eco-conscious products for personal and commercial use and is one of several ethical consumer sites featured in the current issue of The Boston Review.

Just in time for holiday shopping, this comprehensive discussion of Ethical Consumerism has myriad expert voices in firsthand accounts responding to an introductory article by Dara O’Rourke. The special edition is as full as Santa’s bag when it comes to inspirational language and a defense of activist, conscious, or ethical consumption.

But one of the more practical elements is the inclusion of several consumer goods rating systems. GoodGuide is a product of O’Rourke’s own research while at UC Berkeley. The Guide is even downloadable as an app to use in an actual store. The site provides simple 1 – 10 ratings for a virtually endless number of products from shampoo to jeans. Some of the detractors in the article argue that his 1 – 10 method is not just simple, but an oversimplification, and they may have some validity.

Greentopia rates companies strictly environmentally, awarding zero to four leaves (like stars). It also caters business searches to many local areas. I was encouraged to see something from my own home receive the highest possible rating: the makers of Fat Tire Ale, New Belgium Brewery, got 4 out of 4 leaves.

Better World Shopper grades companies (literally A through F) according to five categories—human rights, the environment, animal protection, community involvement, and social justice—free online and provides more comprehensive portable guides for a fee.

Project Label is largely reader-driver, opening it up to the whims and biases of voters, but they have these handy Social Nutrition Labels that break down a company’s impact like the nutrition guide on the sides of food items. They also list ethical awards a company has won to help them earn that rank.

Rankings vary among the sites and can seem counterintuitive. As with GoodGuide, many of the ratings on Project Label are fairly liberal. For example, Nestle receives an overall 74.2% when Better World Shopper gives Nestle an F. Trader Joe’s, a store the layperson like myself might perceive as ethical, gets a C on Project Label, just two stars—leaves—on Greenopia, but a big A- on Better World Shopper. There are similarities as well though: Gap and Levi’s both score in the 80s on these sites; Patagonia is praised by all.

Know More is a wiki, with Wikipedia’s well-known and easy to navigate page layout. The site was started by poets Bernard Dolan and Sage Francis. The articles posted on company history and behavior are informative and current. The startling, behind-the-consumer-curtain images are what may stay with you though.

There are more sites in the Boston Review article, too many to have investigated by this time. And that seems to be key to sort out the contradictory information on some of them.  But if you are charging into the holiday fray to charge your way to present heaven, or if you want to buy the greenest jacket this season, these sites of ethical consumerism are definitely worth visiting.

Additional sites listed in the article: Alonovo hones online shopping choices to ethical preferences; Ethiscore; Evo; Skin Deep; and ShopWell ,dedicated to healthy food choices.

Many students proved to be just as, if not more informed than I. But many were still completely ignorant of the national protests, which is why I was comfortable lending the time to the discussion. A moment of this significance should not be ignored by the country’s future citizens of consequence; it should not be treated like a distraction from the glut of vampire films and glitzy cell phones.

Knowledgeable students seemed to be utilizing their electronic savvy to enhance their civic engagement. They introduced the class to several youtube clips of live footage of the protests, including Officer Pike pepper spraying the UC Davis students repeatedly, the resulting meme of him pepper spraying everything from the Mona Lisa to the Constitution to Snoopy, and to the particularly provocative video of an unknown officer in Oakland who uses a flash-bomb to disrupt a handful of protesters who have congregated—on the other side of the police barricade—around an injured, unconscious man. That man would later turn out to be an Iraq war veteran.

Some students disagreed with the movement, some supported it. But a majority of the class saw this particular action as unconscionable and simply wrong.

This led to broader topic discussions of civic engagement and forms of responsibility. I challenged students to engage others during their Thanksgiving, rather than recede into personal media devices, rather than let the day run without incident in an attempt not to anger someone politically or religiously. Sympathetic debate is all too absent in our popular culture, with media figures and organizations dominating discussion with vociferous bombast. Face to face conversation with extended family members who might disagree with your views—perhaps significantly disagree—can remind everyone that policies are not absent people.

The second direction of the discussion turned to the purpose and tactics of the police, where it’s easy to generalize. Students—many people in fact—love to hate the police, calling them power trippers and corrupt. To these claims, I usually ask students about the last time they interacted with an officer. Was it receiving a ticket? Being somehow reprimanded?

Most of us might have a negative impression of police officers because most of the time we encounter one, we’re on the receiving end of punishment. The method by which this punishment is delivered is up for debate, however.

It’s also beneficial to see both of these actions—at CSU Davis and Occupy Oakland—as the work of individuals. The question, though, is this: Do those individuals belong to a group that encourages, condones, supports those actions such that the individuals had no reason to second-guess themselves? Has the atmosphere of that institution—our police force—grown so hostile—in general, and to the civilian force specifically—that attacking, rather than protecting civilians is now part of the mindset of some officers, if not a reflex in others?

Because surely the officers we see today are not those I at least grew up being told to admire. When Sesame Street played “Who are the people in your neighborhood?” it told me to trust the police. But the volume of instances of police brutality and abuse of power associated with Occupy or outside is too large to ignore.

And in the CSU example, the extended video clearly shows Officer Pike surrounded by a horde of other officers, pepper spray visible to all for several minutes. His actions are a surprise to no one.

Recent articles in The Nation and Los Angeles Times suggest 9/11 as the cause of a creeping militarized response to group movements. In Fullerton, California, Kelly Thomas—a homeless man with schizophrenia familiar to residents—was beaten to death by 6 officers in 2011, but the beating of Rodney King happened in 1991: 9/11 can’t be the sole reason.

In the above situations, adrenaline and groupthink are often blamed, a groupthink that insulates officers from self-doubt and responsibility and exaggerates their sense of authority. The police do have unenviable, extremely high stress jobs that continually place them in conflict, which is why increased and intensive counseling should be mandatory for all officers. This would alleviate the routine emotional buildup involved with police work and counter the macho, independent silence that characteristic of the field.

In California, the minimum requirement for a CHP officer is a high school diploma. This too should be revisited. If only to join the bandwagon, educational requirements are going up, up, up in our country—the police, as figures of authority in our neighborhoods and elsewhere, ought to be reflective of the majority’s background and ability.

Policing comes with just this special demarcation of knowledge. They serve not just as agents of protection (or punishment), but as agents of situational authority. A significant line exists between officers and civilians—especially in protest situations, which are not as simple as speeding, but are social demonstrations of broader, vaguer struggles of judgment. Protests, union actions and the like are manifestations of power, which in our society is routinely ceded to the police. This in turn creates a populace that feels disempowered, the wonders despondently, “What can I do?” rather than asks with optimism, “What can I do?” People move deeper into isolation, escaping into personal media and other diversions as they feel less and less like legitimate citizens.

Social movements such as Occupy or organized labor solidify responsibility within the community once more, the same community that promoted the police department—and theoretically the individuals it employs—to its position. When the purpose of that authorized group splits so radically as it arguably has from its original empowering purpose, a deep realignment should occur. Individual citizens acting as moral and social authorities in their own right is one excellent corrective method. Using cell phone cameras to become citizen journalists is another. Pondering aloud the practical philosophy of the organization is another.

As an educator, I have worked in some diverse places, including a mental hospital. My first post-graduate teaching position came, shamefully, at a for-profit—the kind advertised in the middle of the day during commercial breaks for The Price is Right and Tyra Banks. The school in question had a few specializations such as video game programming, interior design, and criminal justice.

Regardless of the decision-making process of all who choose to pay $40k a year for knowledge you could get for exponentially less, the lowest performing students in my classes were inevitably the criminal justice majors. I cannot say that they went on to become police officers.

I do not know that they bumbled their way into a uniform and firearm like Alex’s lackeys in A Clockwork Orange. Though during one class, one students was actually served papers by uniformed officers for a domestic dispute. The student had been dodging it for weeks and refused to take them from the officers who dropped them at his feet.

The final disturbing insight into the group’s mentality came when I asked one student why she even wanted to become a cop. Her unflinching answer was “So I can carry a gun.”

Of course, Barbie is still biologically-impossible-fabulous! as she graphs, measures, and charts the dimensions of her eco-friendly doll house. Outfits for the line will appear professional, while still suggesting girlish frivolity, undoubtedly.

The full, linked article appears on Mother Jones where writer Matt Hickman says “Past ‘I Can Be …’ Barbies have included movie star, veterinarian, dentist, lifeguard, news anchor, racecar driver, ballerina, and, ummm, bride.”

Coincidentally, dirtcakes was recently inspired by an art exhibit featuring imagined Barbies, repurposed doll-sculptures that explore the stereotyped, suppressed, and assaulted feminine that is perpetuated by the Barbie myth. Images of the re-visioned Barbies from artists Melissa Avila and Jill Wade are prominent elements of our upcoming issue 3: Girls Will Be Women. Also in the issue will be the winner of the Inaugural dirtcakes poetry contest, Leah Greene’s Beningo Street – Wife, alongside stunning work from artists and writers such as Cristin O’Keefe Aptowitz, Lauren Camp, Ching-In Chen, Anna Leahy, and Jeanann Verlee.

To all who contributed and submitted, thank you. We look forward to publishing another issue.

Three women share the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.

Leymah Gbowee, Liberian Peace Activist
Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
Tawakul Karman, a Yemeni rights activist

are honored for their “non-violent struggles for women’s rights.”

Click the grey arrow below to hear Thorbjørn Jagland announce the award on UN Radio.

Thank heaven for little girls who will become women of peace.

“Girls Will Be Women”

Coming soon.

Japanese flower arrangers doing Ikebana (Japanse bloemschikkers bezig met Ikebana)
Nationaal Archief Holland.  Photo Courtesy of Flickr: Commons

 __________________________________________________________________________

Yes, we feel you watching and waiting for “Girls Will Be Women.”  To pass the time, we offer a small interlude before dirtcakes Issue Number Three arrives in print.

Consider this: In creative endeavors, there’s a magical quality to the number three.

For example, floral arranging has Ikebana, a Japanese discipline where the practitioner uses a plant’s blossom, stem, and leaves to design an overall triangular form.

Artists and photographers divide scenes into imaginary grids of three lines – both horizontal and vertical.  Images with the most visual interest and tension are created when there’s a balance of empty space with a focal point within each third.

Writers too are well-versed in The Rule of Three. One of the most basic structural breakdowns used to describe a story is that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Plays and films use the three-act structure.  Character threesomes appear ubiquitously. Think of  The Three Musketeers, Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. And then these three characters interact while they try and fail, then try again and fail differently, and finally succeed, or fail, spectacularly depending.

So it seems only natural that we here at dirtcakes are especially excited to pause and reflect on the beauty of three as we await our third print edition.

In our first year, we published two print editions, sponsored a Poetry Contest and a Poetry Reading to Benefit the St. Lucia Red Cross, and featured an emerging writer’s take on becoming the voice for a new generation.

Our writers represent Argentina, Canada, China, Denmark, England, Ireland, India, Japan, Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, Thailand, the US, and Vietnam.  More importantly, each writer and photographer was paid for his or her work, a rarity in the literary magazine publishing world.

If you’d like to support what we do here and own your own copy of these first two editions, please click on “The Hunger Issue” and “School Me” links on the home page.  We still have some back issues available for sale.

Our next issue, “Girls Will Be Women,” will feature the winning entry from our First Annual Poetry Contest.  We couldn’t be happier to introduce you to Leah Greene’s poem, “Beningo Street–Wife.”  It was selected and read by Lynne Thompson as part of the dirtcakes co-sponsored fundraiser for St. Lucian victims of Hurricane Thomas.

Lastly, we’ll open submissions up again soon as we look for contributions to our “Oh Baby” issue, Dedicated to Goal #4: Reduce Infant Mortality.

But that’s getting a little ahead of ourselves.
Right now, it’s time time to balance the finishing touches of Issue Number 3.