Milk

I just love this story. The creeps at Wal Mart are trying to do something right and the Moms don't like the mess. Well -- all I can say is they're trying and all we really expect of our small children is that they try their best. Now I have to find a milk poem and a photo of a beautiful old fashioned bottle --

Thesis Prospectus Approved!

With reservations - of course - but still!!

I've heard from my Dean today and as soon as my potential advisor gets back to town, I could be in business. I guess I better get down to business. This blog could get very interesting very soon (she says hopefully and with much trepidation!) Here's the working title: The Sock of God: Evolution of Domestic Imagery in American Poetry in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century. But, which poets???? Here's the Stanford bio for Al Gelpi - who, from the look of this bio, might be just the guy for me!

And here's a photo, just for inspiration - one of my heroes -- Anne Sexton. It's her poem, "Snow", from which I derive my title, "the sock of God."

Oh, and what the heck, here's the poem.

Snow

Snow

Snow, blessed snow,

comes out of the sky

like bleached flies.

The ground is no longer naked.

The ground has on its clothes.

The trees poke out of sheets

and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.

There is hope everywhere.

I bite it.Someone once said:

Don't bite till you know

if it's bread or stone.

What I bite is all bread,

rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.

There is hope everywhere.

Today God gives milk

and I have the pail.

The Best Shorts Ever

For Jackson. Who wants his picture on my blog too, and who chose this photo, because those were the best shorts ever. Lucky guy.

Made in China and Phebus Etienne

I'm running into these domestic literary songs a lot these days -- once you start looking it never ends. Here's a great article I read in the UCSD alumni mag about Sara Bongiorni and her family who tried to live for a year without buying anything "Made in China" -- I'm sure that was very laundry challenging.

"I worry about human rights and the hardships of Chinese factory life, but it was too late to think we could solve those problems by pushing China away."

She wrote a whole book and told her story on TV. I could try that with my laundry problems.

Here's a poem I read this morning in a Autumn 2006 volume of "The Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets." I am way behind with my journals. The poem is by Phebus Etienne, an emerging (emerged) Haitian-American poet who published her first (only) book Chainstitching in 2006 -- the title poem of that collection, "Chainstitching" belongs at the top of my laundry songs list -- and as I've been looking around the internet today to find a copy of it (retyping lazy about I am) I learn that she is dead.

Only 41 years old, only one book of poems. (Strange that even though AAP published her poems in their journal in 2006, one can no longer find her mentioned on the AAP website -- I had to go to poetryfoundation.org to locate her obituary.) The most information about this poet can be found at Cave Canem's website, and all over the blogosphere (is that spelled right?).

CHAINSTITCHING

After I buried my mother, I would see her often,
standing at the foot of my bed
in a handmade nightgown she trimmed with lace
whenever I was restless with fever or menstrual cramps.
I was not afraid, and if her appearance was a delusion,
it only confirmed my heritage.
Haitians always have relationships with the dead.
Each Sabbath, I lit a candle that burned for seven days.
I created an altar on the top shelf of an old television cart.
It was decorated with her Bible, a copy of The Three Musketeers,
freesia, delphinium or lilies if they were in season.
My offering of her favorite things didn’t conjure
conversations with her spirit as I had hoped.
But there was a dream or two where she was happy,
garnets dangling from her ears,
and one night she shuffled some papers,
which could have been history of my difficult luck
because she said, “We have to do something about this.”

She hasn’t visited me for months.
I worry that my life is an insult to her memory,
that she looks in and turns away
because I didn’t remain a virgin until I married,
because my debts will remain unforgiven.

Lightning tattoos the elms as florists make
corsages to honor living mothers.
I think of going to mass at St. Anne, where she was startled
by the fire of wine when she received her first communion.
But I remember that first Mother’s Day without her,
how it pissed me off to watch a seventy year-old daughter
escort her mom to sip from the chalice.

Yesterday, as the rain fell warm on the azaleas,
I planted creeping phlox on my mother’s grace,
urging the miniature flowers to bloom larger next year
like the velvet petals of bougainvillea that covered our neighbor’s gate.
I crave a yard to plant lemon and mango trees as she did.
Tonight I mold dumplings for pumpkin stew,
add a dash of vinegar for spice as she taught me,
sprinkle my palms with flour before rolling the dough between them.
I will thread my needle and embroider a coconut tree on a place mat,
keep stitching her presence in my life.

So here's a question....

Do you think prostitution is domestic work? It certainly has some of the characteristics -- beds, sheets, clean, dirty, repetition, boredom, oppression, expression -- I heard epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani speak on Fresh Air last week. The way she talked about her book The Wisdom of Whores, and the bureaucracy surrounding AIDS research and treatment, got me thinking about this. She says this about changing the way we educate about HIV/AIDS: "It would mean spending lots more of the available money on prostitutes, addicts and gay guys, and lots less on school kids, pregnant women and church groups. It would mean making fun things (sex, drugs) safe, instead of trying to make safe things (abstinence, monogamy) fun." I could say that about changing the way we think about a lot of domestic tasks ... we could try making fun things (hanging up clothes, arranging flowers, playing with children) "safe" -- that is, acceptable as domestic work, instead of making the acceptable things (scrubbing toilets, driving kids around in cars, ironing his shirts) fun.

I may have to look into finding photos and poems along this line -- that is if everyone agrees with me that sex workers can be considered domestic workers -- (is anyone listening to me?)

Magnificently Overqualified Mothers

MomsRising delivered nearly 9,000 resumes -- from working mothers -- to Senator McCain yesterday in support of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. If that's not a Laundry Song I don't know what is. A new kind of domestic beauty --

See the video and send your resume from their website.

I wonder what Daumier's laundresses would think of this? What does it tell you about those women that I don't even know their names -- or how to refer to them without the name of the man who painted their pictures? I think I'll freshen up my resume today. Just in their honor. 5,000 loads of laundry a year and proud of it. That reminds me -- there's some wet stuff that needs to get hung on the line right now -- before I go to work.

Bessie Thomashefsky

This past week the SF Symphony has been performing "The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater" -- a wonderful music, multi-media presentation of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky and the Yiddish Theater in New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Amazing to me was the feminist stance of much of the work Bessie T. did -- her newspaper articles, her songs, her beliefs about women's suffrage and birth control, her trouser roles. I particularly liked several of the songs -- and will try to recreate them here. Here's what the SF Chron had to say. Stay tuned...

Okay, so this is really domestic work

Another painting at the Stanford Cantor Art Center's exhibit (Saved from the Storm) -- this time by Renoir -- of a seamstress. All the proper Laundry Songs ingredients -- a woman, a bent spine, a window, cloth, sharp objects -- art and light and thank goodness the Impressionist painters loved these domestic chores.

Pierre Auguste Renoir (French, 1841-1919), Seamstress at a Window, ca. 1908, oil on canvas. Collection of New Orleans Museum of Art

Saving what you care about -- Floods and Flowers

"Painted in New Orleans, Portrait of Estelle Musson De Gas (1872), was the last in a series of portraits Degas made of his sister-in-law."

A wonderful exhibition is currently being shown at the Stanford Cantor Center. This photo is of one of the paintings saved from a museum in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina by dedicated museum staff. I love the picture -- although I'm not convinced that arranging flowers technically qualifies as domestic work -- saving something you love from a catastrophic natural disaster -- that might qualify. There seem to be many many gardening poems, almost as many as the laundry poems I've found in my searches -- but that's another topic. For now, I'm sticking with laundry, dusting, ironing, bed making -- I think there's another entire oeuvre of cooking and food poetry, too. For another day, another blog.

Tea as Domestic Art

This is one of the most beautiful photos I've seen all year. I've not really thought of tea (making, serving, brewing, drinking) as domestic art before today. Perhaps I should rethink my definitions. Thanks to the NY Times for the photo. And then, we need tea poems.

A Kashmiri woman carried a traditional teapot to family members who were planting the rice crop in Chak-e-Kawoosa, 16 miles west of Srinagar. India expects its rice harvest to increase by 2.4 million tons and wheat output to increase by over 1.2 million tons next year, a top farm ministry official said this week. Photo: Fayaz Kabli/Reuters

Laundress with Attitude

Here is one of my favoirte paintings. This is The Laundress (Renoir, Pierre-Auguste --1880 -- Art Institute in Chicago). She's really telling somebody to turn their socks right-side-out before they dump them in the hamper.