journal | LEAF

Authority Sources

Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship Genre Vocabulary

Bucknell University Studies Volume 1, no. 1

3 items in Collection

Bucknell Review, Vol. 46, Issue 2

Ten Ways of Looking at Prison Lunch

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-model href="https://www.tei-c.org/release/xml/tei/custom/schema/relaxng/tei_all.rng" type="application/xml" schematypens="http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0"?>
<?xml-model href="https://www.tei-c.org/release/xml/tei/custom/schema/relaxng/tei_all.rng" type="application/xml"
	schematypens="https://purl.oclc.org/dsdl/schematron"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LEAF-VRE/code_snippets/refs/heads/main/CSS/leaf.css"?>
<TEI xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0">
	<teiHeader>
		<fileDesc>
			<titleStmt>
				<title>Around and Around</title>
				<author>Marty Pottenger</author>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Haley Beardsley</persName>
					<resp>Editor, encoder</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Erica Delsandro</persName>
					<resp>Investigator, editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Margaret Hunter</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Diane Jakacki</persName>
					<resp>Invesigator, encoder</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Sophie McQuaide</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Olivia Martin</persName>
					<resp>Editor, encoder</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Bri Perea</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Roger Rothman</persName>
					<resp>Investigator, editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Kaitlyn Segreti</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Maggie Smith</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Maya Wadhwa</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<funder>Bucknell University Humanities Center</funder>
				<funder>Bucknell University Office of Undergraduate Research</funder>
				<funder>The Mellon Foundation</funder>
				<funder>National Endowment for the Humanities</funder>
			</titleStmt>
			<publicationStmt>
				<distributor>
					<name>Bucknell University</name>
					<address>
						<street>One Dent Drive</street>
						<settlement>Lewisburg</settlement>
						<region>Pennsylvania</region>
						<postCode>17837</postCode>
					</address>
				</distributor>
				<availability>
					<licence>Bucknell Heresies Project: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
						4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)</licence>
					<licence>Heresies journal: © Heresies Collective</licence>
				</availability>
			</publicationStmt>
			<sourceDesc>
				<biblStruct>
					<analytic>
						<title level="a">Juggling Contradictions: Feminism, the Individual and
							What's Left</title>
						<author>
							<surname>Braderman</surname>
							<forename>Joan</forename>
						</author>
						<date when="1977-01">January 1977</date>
						<textLang xml:lang="eng"/>
					</analytic>
					<monogr>
						<title level="j">Heresies #1: Feminism, Art and Politics</title>
						<imprint>
							<publisher ref="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q20857976">The Heresies
								Collective</publisher>
							<pubPlace>
								<address>
									<name>Heresies</name>
									<postBox>P.O. Boxx 766, Canal Street Station</postBox>
									<settlement>New York</settlement>
									<region>New York</region>
									<postCode>10013</postCode>
								</address>
							</pubPlace>
						</imprint>
						<biblScope unit="issue">1</biblScope>
						<biblScope unit="page">88-93</biblScope>
					</monogr>
					<series>
						<title level="s">Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and
							Politics</title>
						<idno type="Wikidata">https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17022558</idno>
						<idno type="ISSN">0146-3411, 2469-4908</idno>
					</series>
				</biblStruct>
			</sourceDesc>
		</fileDesc>
	</teiHeader>
	<text>
		<body>
			<div type="verse">
				<pb n='35' facs="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/djakacki/heresies/refs/heads/main/issue01/images/01_037.jpg"/>

<head>Ten Ways of Looking at Prison Lunch</head>
						<byline>Gloria Jensen</byline>
						<note>(With apologies to Wallace Stevens)</note>
					<lg>
						<l>1. With both hands over your eyes, releasing</l>
						<l>one hand slowly to peep.</l>
						<l>2. Through the eyes of a friend you have by</l>
						<l>the hand—who reads braille.</l>
						<l>3. In the bing [solitary] where you can refuse</l>
						<l>to have the thing brought in at all and just lie</l>
						<l>there and sleep.</l>
						<l>4. From across the steam line, where people</l>
						<l>marvel at your petite body (if only they knew</l>
						<l>it's not by choice you prefer to remain frail and</l>
						<l>cautious).</l>
						<l>5. From a prison visitor's point of view — when</l>
						<l>suddenly, miraculously, all one sees is steak,</l>
						<l>greens and potatoes.</l>
						<l>6. From your window late at night as you</l>
						<l>watch one man run with a rake, followed by</l>
						<l>another with a sack, followed by a corrections</l>
						<l>officer, followed by a ruckus you've not seen</l>
						<l>but heard — then all three returning, dragging</l>
						<l>a heavy sack.</l>
						<l>7. Witnessing something come ashore in the</l>
						<l>bay and thinking: my, but it gave up a great</l>
						<l>fight.</l>
						<l>8. Wondering why they have signs saying DO</l>
						<l>NOT PEE ON THE GRASS. Then seeing the</l>
						<l>kitchen girls go out, mow it down and bring it in.</l>
						<l>9. Good Friday—when all the world's</l>
						<l>generous and the relief truck pulls up to the</l>
						<l>kitchen door to drop off loads of potatoes they</l>
						<l>couldn't unload anywhere else.</l>
						<l>10. Seeing more clearly the lunch of steak,</l>
						<l>greens and potatoes—as you attack the steak</l>
						<l>first and realize the fight you witnessed (#6) is</l>
						<l>not yet over, for the beast is biting you now too.</l>
					</lg>
			</div>
		</body>
	</text>
</TEI>

Around Coming Around

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-model href="https://www.tei-c.org/release/xml/tei/custom/schema/relaxng/tei_all.rng" type="application/xml" schematypens="http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0"?>
<?xml-model href="https://www.tei-c.org/release/xml/tei/custom/schema/relaxng/tei_all.rng" type="application/xml"
	schematypens="https://purl.oclc.org/dsdl/schematron"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LEAF-VRE/code_snippets/refs/heads/main/CSS/leaf.css"?>
<TEI xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0">
	<teiHeader>
		<fileDesc>
			<titleStmt>
				<title>Upcoming Issues</title>
				<author>Joan Braderman</author>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Haley Beardsley</persName>
					<resp>Editor, encoder</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Erica Delsandro</persName>
					<resp>Investigator, editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Margaret Hunter</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Diane Jakacki</persName>
					<resp>Invesigator, encoder</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Sophie McQuaide</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Olivia Martin</persName>
					<resp>Editor, encoder</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Bri Perea</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Roger Rothman</persName>
					<resp>Investigator, editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Kaitlyn Segreti</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Maggie Smith</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Maya Wadhwa</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<funder>Bucknell University Humanities Center</funder>
				<funder>Bucknell University Office of Undergraduate Research</funder>
				<funder>The Mellon Foundation</funder>
				<funder>National Endowment for the Humanities</funder>
			</titleStmt>
			<publicationStmt>
				<distributor>
					<name>Bucknell University</name>
					<address>
						<street>One Dent Drive</street>
						<settlement>Lewisburg</settlement>
						<region>Pennsylvania</region>
						<postCode>17837</postCode>
					</address>
				</distributor>
				<availability>
					<licence>Bucknell Heresies Project: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
						4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)</licence>
					<licence>Heresies journal: © Heresies Collective</licence>
				</availability>
			</publicationStmt>
			<sourceDesc>
				<biblStruct>
					<analytic>
						<title level="a">Juggling Contradictions: Feminism, the Individual and
							What's Left</title>
						<author>
							<surname>Braderman</surname>
							<forename>Joan</forename>
						</author>
						<date when="1977-01">January 1977</date>
						<textLang xml:lang="eng"/>
					</analytic>
					<monogr>
						<title level="j">Heresies #1: Feminism, Art and Politics</title>
						<imprint>
							<publisher ref="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q20857976">The Heresies
								Collective</publisher>
							<pubPlace>
								<address>
									<name>Heresies</name>
									<postBox>P.O. Boxx 766, Canal Street Station</postBox>
									<settlement>New York</settlement>
									<region>New York</region>
									<postCode>10013</postCode>
								</address>
							</pubPlace>
						</imprint>
						<biblScope unit="issue">1</biblScope>
						<biblScope unit="page">88-93</biblScope>
					</monogr>
					<series>
						<title level="s">Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and
							Politics</title>
						<idno type="Wikidata">https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17022558</idno>
						<idno type="ISSN">0146-3411, 2469-4908</idno>
					</series>
				</biblStruct>
			</sourceDesc>
		</fileDesc>
	</teiHeader>
	<text>
		<body>
			<div type="verse">
				<pb n="102"
					facs="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/djakacki/heresies/refs/heads/main/issue01/images/01_104.jpg"/>

<head>Around Coming Around - a performance</head>
				<byline>Marty Pottenger</byline>

<lg>
					<l>I WAS SIXTEEN</l>
					<l>WAS I A CHILD?</l>
					<l>I WAS SIXTEEN</l>
					<l>I CAN'T REMEMBER</l>
					<l>I CAN'T REMEMBER</l>
					<l>WAS I A CHILD?</l>
					<l>I WAS SIXTEEN</l>
					<l>MY FATHER AND I</l>
					<l>WERE DRIVING HOME</l>
					<l>AFTER VISITING A COLLEGE</l>
					<l>AFTER DRIVING ALL DAY</l>
					<l>WE STOPPED AT A MOTEL</l>
					<l>THE WALLS WERE GREEN</l>
					<l>THAT TERRIBLE LIGHT GREEN</l>
					<l>USED IN MOTELS</l>
					<l>THE DESK CLERK SMIRKED</l>
					<l>AND I WAS EMBARRASSED</l>
					<l>I DIDN'T KNOW WHY</l>
					<l>I WAS SIXTEEN</l>
					<l>WAS I A CHILD?</l>
					<l>I CAN'T REMEMBER</l>
					<l>THE DESK CLERK ASKED</l>
					<l>DO YOU WANT SINGLE</l>
					<l>OR DOUBLE BEDS, SIR?</l>
					<l>AND I SAID</l>
					<l>TWO BEDS TWO BEDS</l>
					<l>TWO SINGLE BEDS</l>
					<l>WAS I A CHILD?</l>
					<l>THE CLERK SMIRKED</l>
					<l>MY FATHER SAID</l>
					<l>IT DOESN'T MATTER</l>
					<l>AND I SAID INSIDE</l>
					<l>BUT IT DOES MATTER</l>
					<l>IT DOES MATTER</l>
					<l>I WAS SIXTEEN</l>
					<l>I WAS A CHILD</l>
					<l>AND WE WENT</l>
					<l>TO THE ROOM</l>
					<l>WITH THE TWO SINGLE BEDS</l>
					<l>I WENT INTO THE BATHROOM</l>
					<l>TO PUT ON MY NIGHTGOWN</l>
					<l>A SHORT NIGHTGOWN</l>
					<l>WITH GREEN AND BLUE FLOWERS</l>
					<l>I CAN'T REMEMBER</l>
					<l>AND I GOT INTO BED</l>
					<l>THE BED BY THE BATHROOM</l>
					<l>AND SAT ON MY BED BEFORE</l>
					<l>WAS I A CHILD?</l>
					<l>AND HE WAS IN THE BATHROOM</l>
					<l>A LONG TIME</l>
					<l>HE CAME OUT</l>
					<l>AND SAT</l>
					<l>I CANT REMEMBER</l>
					<l>ON MY BED</l>
					<l>AND PUT HIS HAND</l>
					<l>ON MY KNEE</l>
					<l>AND I LAY THERE</l>
					<l>AND DID NOT MOVE</l>
					<l>HE TOUCHED MY BREAST</l>
					<l>I CAN'T REMEMBER</l>
					<l>STROKING MY BREASTS</l>
					<l>ON TOP OF MY NIGHTGOWN</l>
					<l>AND HE CAME DOWN</l>
					<l>ON TOP OF ME</l>
					<l>IWAS SIXTEEN</l>
					<l>WAS I A CHILD?</l>
					<l>I CAN'T REMEMBER</l>
					<l>I CAN'T REMEMBER</l>
					<l>HE LAY THERE</l>
					<l>I DID NOT MOVE</l>
					<l>THE BLANKET BETWEEN US</l>
					<l>I WAS SIXTEEN</l>
					<l>HE STROKED MY BREASTS</l>
					<l>BREATHING IN MY FACE</l>
					<l>AND ASKED ME</l>
					<l>ICAN'T REMEMBER</l>
					<l>IF I LIKED IT</l>
					<l>AND I</l>
					<l>AND I</l>
					<l>AND I CAN'T REMEMBER</l>
					<l>INSIDE I SAID NO</l>
					<l>INSIDE I SAID NO</l>
					<l>I CAN'T REMEMBER</l>
					<l>AND HE STAYED THERE</l>
					<l>ON TOP OF ME</l>
					<l>MOVING AROUND</l>
					<l>TOUCHING MY BREASTS</l>
					<l>TOUCHING MY NECK</l>
					<l>AND HE ASKED ME</l>
					<l>IF I LIKED IT</l>
					<l>AND I SAID NO</l>
					<l>AND HE GOT UP</l>
					<l>AND HE GOT OFF</l>
					<l>AND THE WHOLE NIGHT</l>
					<l>I STAYED AWAKE</l>
					<l>WAITING</l>
					<l>I CAN'T REMEMBER</l>
					<l>AND THE NEXT MORNING</l>
					<l>WE GOT UP</l>
					<l>WE HAD BREAKFAST</l>
					<l>AND WE DROVE</l>
					<l>THE REST OF THE WAY</l>
					<l>HOME</l>
				</lg>
			</div>
			<div type="verse">
				<pb n="103"
					facs="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/djakacki/heresies/refs/heads/main/issue01/images/01_105.jpg"/>
				<head>mime</head>
				<lg>
					<l>open blade pause</l>
					<l>take small knife out of pocket</l>
					<l>hold knife in right hand</l>
					<l>turn left forearm palm up</l>
					<l>cut lightly/carefully 3 times</l>
					<l>holding left arm still</l>
					<l>put knife away closing</l>
					<l>blade against right thigh</l>
					<l>turn cut wrist over</l>
					<l>catch blood in right hand</l>
					<l>when hand almost full</l>
					<l>pour blood from right hand</l>
					<l>into left hand</l>
					<l>apply pressure/release</l>
					<l>pressure/release</l>
					<l>with right fingers</l>
					<l>upon left wrist</l>
					<l>stopping flow of blood</l>
					<l>eyes focus always on action</l>
					<l>take two right fingers</l>
					<l>and dip in blood</l>
					<l>look up as if in the mind's</l>
					<l>mirror and slowly paint lines</l>
					<l>down right cheek</l>
					<l>repeat and paint left cheek</l>
					<l>repeat and draw a line</l>
					<l>across forehead</l>
					<l>repeat and place both fingers</l>
					<l>on chin</l>
					<l>drop hands and stare</l>
					<l>at own reflection</l>
				</lg>
			</div>
			<div type="verse">
				<lg>
					<l>one for me. one for you. one for me. (dealing</l>
					<l>imaginary cards) one for you. one for me. one</l>
					<l>for you. one for me. let's see what you got?</l>
					<l>MONEY .... ULCERS ... and a PENIS. how 'bout that—</l>
					<l>i got LESBIAN... LOVE.. and uh...A TERRIBLE FEAR</l>
					<l>i tell you what, i'll trade you some of my fear</l>
					<l>for some of your—no? so ok. we stick with what</l>
					<l>we got.</l>
					<l>(photo: Libby Turnock)</l>
				</lg>
			</div>
		</body>
		<back>
			<p> Marty Pottenger lives in New York City, is a carpenter, and performs
				improvisationally "with whoever's in the room, whatever's on hand, and what's inside
				all of us." </p>

</back>
	</text>
</TEI>

Upcoming Issues

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-model href="https://www.tei-c.org/release/xml/tei/custom/schema/relaxng/tei_all.rng" type="application/xml" schematypens="http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0"?>
<?xml-model href="https://www.tei-c.org/release/xml/tei/custom/schema/relaxng/tei_all.rng" type="application/xml"
	schematypens="https://purl.oclc.org/dsdl/schematron"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LEAF-VRE/code_snippets/refs/heads/main/CSS/leaf.css"?>
<TEI xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0">
	<teiHeader>
		<fileDesc>
			<titleStmt>
				<title>Upcoming Issues</title>
				<author>Joan Braderman</author>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Haley Beardsley</persName>
					<resp>Editor, encoder</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Erica Delsandro</persName>
					<resp>Investigator, editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Margaret Hunter</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Diane Jakacki</persName>
					<resp>Invesigator, encoder</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Sophie McQuaide</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Olivia Martin</persName>
					<resp>Editor, encoder</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Bri Perea</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Roger Rothman</persName>
					<resp>Investigator, editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Kaitlyn Segreti</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Maggie Smith</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<respStmt>
					<persName>Maya Wadhwa</persName>
					<resp>Editor</resp>
				</respStmt>
				<funder>Bucknell University Humanities Center</funder>
				<funder>Bucknell University Office of Undergraduate Research</funder>
				<funder>The Mellon Foundation</funder>
				<funder>National Endowment for the Humanities</funder>
			</titleStmt>
			<publicationStmt>
				<distributor>
					<name>Bucknell University</name>
					<address>
						<street>One Dent Drive</street>
						<settlement>Lewisburg</settlement>
						<region>Pennsylvania</region>
						<postCode>17837</postCode>
					</address>
				</distributor>
				<availability>
					<licence>Bucknell Heresies Project: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
						4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)</licence>
					<licence>Heresies journal: © Heresies Collective</licence>
				</availability>
			</publicationStmt>
			<sourceDesc>
				<biblStruct>
					<analytic>
						<title level="a">Juggling Contradictions: Feminism, the Individual and
							What's Left</title>
						<author>
							<surname>Braderman</surname>
							<forename>Joan</forename>
						</author>
						<date when="1977-01">January 1977</date>
						<textLang xml:lang="eng"/>
					</analytic>
					<monogr>
						<title level="j">Heresies #1: Feminism, Art and Politics</title>
						<imprint>
							<publisher ref="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q20857976">The Heresies
								Collective</publisher>
							<pubPlace>
								<address>
									<name>Heresies</name>
									<postBox>P.O. Boxx 766, Canal Street Station</postBox>
									<settlement>New York</settlement>
									<region>New York</region>
									<postCode>10013</postCode>
								</address>
							</pubPlace>
						</imprint>
						<biblScope unit="issue">1</biblScope>
						<biblScope unit="page">88-93</biblScope>
					</monogr>
					<series>
						<title level="s">Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and
							Politics</title>
						<idno type="Wikidata">https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17022558</idno>
						<idno type="ISSN">0146-3411, 2469-4908</idno>
					</series>
				</biblStruct>
			</sourceDesc>
		</fileDesc>
	</teiHeader>
	<text>
		<body>
			<div>
				<pb n="113"
					facs="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/djakacki/heresies/refs/heads/main/issue01/images/01_115.jpg"/>

<head>WE ARE SOLICITING MATERIAL FOR THE NEXT THREE ISSUES OF HERESIES</head>
				<p>Patterns of Communication and space Among Women: architectural, social and sexual
					networks; interactions (past and present) between women — letters, diaries,
					conversations, groups; the politics of fashion and the body; use and experience
					of space, narrative, and art; women as a politically demonstrative force;
					questioning the public / private dichotomy; science fiction, humor, photography,
					film. <emph>Deadline: mid-February</emph>.</p>
				<p>Lesbian Art and Artists: the political implica- tions of lebian art forms; the
					image of lesbians in art; collectivity— getting rid of the male ego; the
					relationship between eroticism and the intellect; the lesbian as monster;
					androgyny; passionate friendships; research, documentation and analysis of
					past lesbian artists and their work; dialogue between contemporary lesbian
					visual and literary artists; class analysis of lesbian models; lesbian art,
					form and content: hotography; creative writing. <emph>Deadline: mid-April</emph></p>
				<p>Women's Traditional Arts and Artmaking: decoration, pattern, ritual,
					repetition, opulence, self-ornamentation; arts of non-Western women; breaking
					down barriers between the fine and the decorative arts; the effect of
					industrialization on women's work and work processes; the exclusion of
					women's traditional arts from the mainsteam of art history. <emph>Deadline:
					mid-October.</emph></p>
			</div>
			<div>
				<head>Guidelines for Prospective Contributors:</head>
				<p>The HERESIES collective wishes to solicit material for future issues. Themes and
					deadlines for these issues will be announced well in advance. Manuscripts
					(1,000-5,000 words) should be typewritten, double spaced on 8½ x 11“ paper, and
					submitted in duplicate. We welcome for consideration either outlines or
					description of articles, or finished manuscripts with bibliographic foot notes
					(if necessary) at the end of the paper in numerical order. Writers should feel
					free to inquire about the possibility of an article. If you are submitting
					visual material, please send a photograph, xerox, or description ( please do not
					send the original). All manuscripts and visional material must be accompanied by
					a stamped self-addressed envelope. HERESIES will pay a fee of $5-$50, as our
					budget allows, for published material, and it is our hope to offer higher fees
					in the future. There will be no commissioned articles and we cannot guarantee
					acceptance of submitted material. We will not include reviews or monographs on
					contemporary women.</p>
			</div>
		</body>
	</text>
</TEI>

Skyscraper Seduction, Skyscraper Rape

<head>Skyscraper Seduction Skyscraper Rape</head>
				<byline>Dolores Hayden</byline>
				<epigraph>
					<p>Once you learn to look upon architecture not merely as an art, more or less
						well, more or less badly, done, but as a social manifestation, the critical
						eye becomes clairvoyant, and obscure and unnoted phenomena become
						illuminated.</p>
				</epigraph>
				<cit>
					<ref>—Louis Sullivan, Kindergarten Chats, 1901</ref>
				</cit>
				<div>
					<p> The skyline of Manhattan tells the dynamic story of the growth of American
						capitalism in the past century; we see a few lively Gothic and Art Deco
						towers marked with the names of individual tycoons, then many bland
						International-style office towers built by industrial corporations, real
						estate developers, and the government; and finally, a limited number of
						super towers, remote and anonymous, like the multi-national corporations or
						multi-jurisdictional bureaucracies which inhabit them. A complex national
						symbol, the American skyscraper has been associated with military force and
						corporate expansion during various phases of American economic and urban
						growth. In popular culture, skyscrapers have also symbolized personal social
						mobility and personal sexuality for those who commission, design, or use
						these buildings. In the history of world architecture, the skyscraper ranks
						as America's most distinctive technical innovation; in the history of human
						settlements, the skyscraper dominated city is America's legacy to the world.
						For a century most American architectural historians have busily
						rationalized the aesthetic, functional, and social distress the skyscraper
						creates, nurturing the prevalent belief that the skyscraper is a glorious
						triumph of engineering, a natural part of urban life, and an inevitable
						result of urban concentration.</p>
					<note>1. For an aesthetic justification, see Louis Sullivan, "The Tall Office
						Building Artistically Considered,"" in <title>Kindergarden Chats and Other
							Writings</title> (New York: Wittenborn, 1947). For an aesthetic analysis
						focusing on analogies with classical columns, see Winston Weisman, "A New
						View of Skyscraper History," in Edgar Kauffman, ed., <title>The Rise of an
							American Architecture</title> (New York: Praeger, 1970). Diana Agrest,
						in "Le Ciel est la limite," adds to this with a discussion about towers
						reaching into outer space, <title>L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui</title>
						(sky-scraper issue) (March-April 1975), pp. 55-64. Cass Gilbert, in his
						intro duction to Skyscrapers of New York by Vernon Howe Bailey (New York:
						Rudge, 1928), goes on about "Mt. Woolworth" and the "Singer-horn," viewing
						skyscrapers as mountains and cliffs created in the city. Many other
						architects take up this last image, Hugh Ferriss and Raymond Hood being
						notable examples. Manfredo Tafuri has criticized it in the
							<title>L'Architecture d'aujourd'hui</title> issue. A brief article which
						provides welcome relief from the usual romanticization is by Elizabeth
						Lindquist Cock and Estelle Jussim, "Machismo in American Architecture,"
							<title>Feminist Art Journal</title> (Spring 1974), pp. 8-10, but the
						authors conclude, "...at what cost these expressions of machistic corporate
						power? ... Perhaps it is time to in sist that women be given the chance to
						design our buildings." This suggestion bypasses the economic demand for
						skyscrapers rather naively, assuming that female architects employed by
						large corporations would actually be in a position to create real
						alternatives. Gertrude Kerbis, Chicago architect, makes a more realistic
						assessment of the small changes possible when she states that men have
						designed high-rises as sexual symbols and that if she got a chance to design
						a skyscraper, it would have some air spaces for wind to pass through. On
						Kerbis, see Donna Joy Newman, "High-rise-ing Women, Making a Mark on the
						Skyline," <title>Chicago Tribune</title> (August 8, 1976), Sec. 5, p.
						7.</note>
					<p>While the skyscraper is a cultural artifact reflecting the economic
						developments of the past century, it is also a building type designed to
						affect both economic activity and social relations. As a result, a fuller
						history of the skyscraper reveals a century of struggles and protests
						against the tendency to build ever higher. The builders' fantasies alternate
						with grim reality. Each new argument in favor of the skyscraper may
						incorporate some response to previous urban protests against it. Yet there
						is no escape from the contradictions of the capitalist city; as an
						instrument for enhancing land values and corporate eminence, the sky scraper
						consumes human lives, lays waste to human settlements, and ultimately
						overpowers the urban economic activities which provided its original
						justification.</p>
					<p>Perhaps the metaphor of rape suggested by the strongly phallic form of the
						skyscraper can illuminate the process by which American urban residents and
						workers have, at times, resigned themselves to this oppressive architectural
						form. In our literature, as in our judicial system, rape has often been
						presented as seduction. The aggressor "couldn't help himself," we are told,
						or the victim "really wanted it." The skyscraper is justified by builders
						with the same rhetoric: developers "can't help themselves," or the city
						"really wants it," despite the economic and social anguish it brings. A
						brief review of skyscraper history illuminates a painful dialectical process
						with alternating themes of reality and fantasy, rape and seduction. </p>
				</div>
				<div>
					<head>First Fantasy: "Manifest Destiny"</head>
					<p>The earliest tall structures in the United States, monumental military
						obelisks and columns like the Bunker Hill Battle Monument (completed in
						1843), provided symbolic as well as technological precedents for skyscraper
						construction. These monuments usually included observatories which became
						popular spots for surveying the surrounding urban and rural landscape. Such
						grand vistas were associated with the cry for westward expansion or
						"manifest destiny" accepted by many patriotic Americans as a political goal
						during the mid-nineteenth century. John Zukowsky has described the
						experience of the ascending observers, ...afforded seemingly endless
						panoramic views, and visual participation in those expansionist concepts
						without facing the dangers, hardships, and expense of physical relocation
						west." He adds that "the military connotations inherent in those monuments
						reminded all that this westward expansion would be protected, and policies
						of Manifest Destiny upheld through force if necessary."</p>
					<note>2. John Zukowsky, "Monumental American Obelisks—Centennial Vistas,"
						unpublished paper (1975).</note>
					<p>The symbolic imagery of military monuments was first transformed into a
						vision of the American city by Erastus Salisbury Field, an itinerant painter
						from westem Massachusetts. His Historical Monument of the American Republic
						combined in one large canvas ten columns which implied "visual participation
						in expansionist concepts, as well as militarism appropriate to the 1876
						centennial celebration of American independence. He composed these columns,
						usually seen as isolated monuments, into a spectacular urban design with an
						elevated railway linking the observatories at their tops. During the
						following decade, the American city began to evolve dramatically in the
						direction Field had whimsically imagined.</p>
					<p>In the 1850s, 1860s and early 1870s, the elevator and the cast iron frame
						boosted the size of commercial buildings, which still tried to conceal their
						height under gawky mansard roof lines; in the 1880s and 1890s, such
						traditional roof lines were abandoned in favor of competition for height,
						and steel-framed towers began to fill the business districts of New York and
						Chicago. Some of these tall buildings included observatories similar to
						those atop the traditional monuments, so visitors to skyscrapers could also
						have panoramic views. Private offices, conference rooms, and clubs were also
						located at the tops of the towers, from which executives could overlook the
						cities their enterprises dominated. Just as the centennial obelisks and
						columns had been decorated with statues of heroes, so the new skyscrapers
						often bore the names of tycoons, and, sometimes, their statues looming
						against the sky, proclaiming not the patriotic warriors' slogan, "manifest
						destiny," but the corporate imperative, "survival of the fittest." </p>
				</div>
				<pb n="109"
					facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_109.jpg"/>
				<div>
					<head>Reality: Workers' Funerals</head>
					<p>The social Darwinist motto, "survival of the fittest," was an accurate
						description of the skyscraper construction process. At the turn of the
						century, competition for height and eagerness to realize a return on
						investments led builders to encourage architects and engineers to strain the
						limits of existing technology with each new tower. "Survival of the fittest"
						in the builders' world of financial speculation thus became the excuse for
						casual attitudes toward safety conditions for construction workers. One
						British reporter lugubriously observed public reactions to the deaths of
						workers on the Woolworth Building, constructed between 1911 and 1913:
						"Anybody in America will tell you without tremor (but with pride) that each
						story of a skyscraper means a life sacrificed. Twenty stories—twenty men
						snuffed out; thirty stories thirty men. A building of some sixty stories is
						now going up sixty corpses, sixty funerals, sixty domestic hearths to be
						slowly rearranged." <note>3. Arnold Bennett, "Your United States," quoted in
							Harlan Paul Douglas, <title level="m">The Suburban Trend</title> (New
							York: Century Co., 1925), p. 305.</note> By 1930, Fortune magazine
						claimed that this estimate was no longer correct, commenting, "In general,
						deaths run from three to eight on sizable buildings," but conceded that "a
						bloodless building is still a marvel."</p>
					<note>4. "Skyscrapers: Builders and Their Tools," in <title level="m">The
							Skyscraper</title>, reprinted from <title level="j">Fortune</title>
						magazine (New York: American Institute of Steel Construction, 1930), p.
						29.</note>
					<p>Ironworkers (who erect structural steel) endure the greatest risks. Often
						builders and journalists use the language of militaristic, romanticized
						machismo to describe the "raw danger" of a "daredevil" ironworker's job, and
						the Stars and Stripes is always unfurled whenever a building is topped out
						suggesting a patriotic conquest. Yet ironworkers themselves may feel
						fearful, since Mike Cherry reports in his autobiography, <title level="m">On
							High Steel</title>, that one out of fifteen dies within ten years of
						entering this risky trade. <note>5. Mike Cherry, <title level="m">On High
								Steel: The Education of an Ironworker</title> (New York: Ballantine
							Books, 1975), p. 27.</note> Cherry recounts his gut reaction to a look
						at the New York skyline: "the anxiety that I'd thought I'd conquered came
						running back at me all over again. ..The city had never struck me as so tall
						before.. .I drove past several buildings that were nearing completion, twice
						pulling over to the curb to stare at them, developing a slight case of the
						shakes."</p>
					<note>6. Ibid., p. 169.</note>
					<p>Theodore James, author of a recent history of the Empire State Building,
						constructed between 1929 and 1931, recalls the days when ironworkers were
						called by the condescending, romantic nickname, "sky-boys," (perhaps
						relating them to military air heroes called fly-boys), yet he passes lightly
						over the fourteen fatalities and numerous injuries that occurred during the
						building process. <note>7. Theodore James, Jr., <title level="m">The Empire
								State Building</title> (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 68. In
							contrast to many American projects, the Eiffel Tower, a tall and complex
							engineering project, was built in Paris in 1889 without a single
							fatality; the effort and resources expended on safety equipment matched
							the desire for spectacular height.</note> Cherry has a grimmer view of
						the trade in New York in those years, claiming that foremen could insist on
						work in hazardous wet weather, or cut off a man's pay at the moment of an
						accident. He states that during the Depression "gangs of out-of-work
						ironworkers hung about on the streets around job sites, so that when a man
						fell, they would be instantly available to take his place." <note>8. Cherry,
							pp. 26-27.</note> In the 1930s, the best workers in each building trade,
						alive and walking at the end of a skyscraper job, were awarded Certificates
						of Superior Craftsmanship" and gold buttons for their skill by a building
						contractors' association, but both union and insurance company safety
						campaigns got nowhere because of the developers' pressure to build
						quickly.</p>
					<note>9. Fortune, p. 29.</note>
					<p>Today, construction workers' unions are stronger. No one has to work in the
						rain, and a fallen worker (or his widow) at least gets paid for a full day's
						work. Still the grim process of building a skyscraper continues to take its
						toll of lives, as Cherry described a death on a New York job in 1972:
						"Somehow, Timmy, in hurrying from one side of the bay to the other, managed
						to put his inside foot down an inch to the right of where he should have,
						and the plank, which had a slight warp in it, rocked...He fell in silence,
						and no sound from the impact of his body on the concrete plaza reached up to
						us." <note>10. Cherry, p. 232.</note> Some of the highly skilled, agile iron
						workers willing to endure the risks of this trade are American Indians, and
						in their employment the symbolism of manifest destiny turns in an ironic
						circle. Descendants of the native Americans who survived the white man's
						self-righteous westward ex pansion in the nineteenth century, they build the
						secular monuments of a redefined, corporate, manifest destiny.</p>
				</div>
				<div>
					<head>Second Fantasy: "Procreant Power</head>
					<p>In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while tycoons battled
						for top positions on the skyline, and "sky-boys' fell to their deaths,
						skyscraper architects began to use the imagery of male sexuality to describe
						these buildings. The earlier monuments had celebrated military conquests,
						and now towers did the same for economic conquests. Just as American authors
						like Theodore Dreiser and Henry James used the imagery of male potency to
						enhance the moneymaking activities of fictional entrepreneurs like Frank
						Cowperwood or Caspar Goodwood, so many American architects began to express
						the economic power of their corporate clients through metaphors of sexual
						power. Thus the <pb n="110"
							facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_110.jpg"
						/> imagery of war and patriotic death was overlaid with an imagery of
						fecundity and generative power. However, as skyscraper architects added the
						office tower to the procession of phallic monu ments in history—including
						poles, obelisks, spires, columns, and watchtowers—very few designers asked
						what the effects would be of insisting that ordinary people regularly
						inhabit such extraordinary, tall, erect structures.</p>
					<p>In 1901 Louis Sullivan praised the design of a commercial building (which was
						not a skyscraper) by H. H. Richardson: "...here is a man for you to look at.
						..a real man, a manly man; a virile force...an entire male. ..a monument to
						trade, to the organized commercial spirit, to the power and progress of the
						age...a male...it sings the song of procreant power...." <note>11. Louis
							Sullivan, <title level="m">Kindergarden Chats</title>, pp. 29-30. He
							refers to the Marshall Field Wholesale Warehouse, Chicago.</note> As
						Sullivan himself and other architects built commercial skyscrapers, this
						language of male identification was extended. One designer saw skyscrapers
						as "symbols of the American spirit—that ruthless, tireless, energeticism
						delightedly proclaiming What a great boy am I!'" <note>12. Claude Bragdon,
							"Skyscrapers, in <title level="m">The Architecture Lectures</title>,
							(Chicago: Creative Age Press, 1942), p. 103.</note> In 1936 Le Corbusier
						identified himself with America's vital economic forces, using phrases which
						recalled Sullivan's "song of procreant power." He observed "an erect
						Manhattan, the drives of Chicago, and so many clear signs of youthful
						power." Viewing the skyline of New York, he wrote, "Feeling comes into play;
						the action of the heart is released; crescendo, allegro, fortissimo. We are
						charged with feeling, we are intoxicated, legs strengthened, chest expanded,
						eager for action, we are filled with a great confidence. <note>13. Le
							Corbusier, "I Am an American," in <title level="m">When All the
								Cathedrals Were White</title> (1936) (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964),
							pp. 90, 149</note> The architectural historian Vincent Scully carried
						this celebration of skyscrapers, money and sex into the 1960s when he
						praised Rockefeller Center as ...one of the few surviving public spaces in
						America that look as if they were designed and used by people who knew what
						stable wealth was and were not ashamed to enjoy it. Flags snap, high heels
						tap: a little sex and aggression, the city's delights."</p>
					<note>14. Vincent Scully, <title level="m">American Architecture and
							Urbanism</title> (New York: Praeger, 1969), p. 154.</note>
					<p>The erotic charge of the skyscraper was more explicitly related to phallic
						erection and penetration in formal discussions of towers as including base,
						shaft, and tip, and in graphic visions of the skyscraper. A rendering of
						Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler's Fraternity Temple scheme of 1891 shows a
						phallic tower on a broad base with a pointed tip piercing the sky. Many
						architectural renderers of the 1920s, such as Hugh Ferriss, often utilized
						perspective to convey a sense of upward thrust, enhanced by strong lighting
						from below. Lighting could suggest ejaculation as well as erection, as in a
						view of the Chrysler Building ejaculating light into the night. (Its
						articulated tip anticipates today's skyscrapers with brightly lit revolving
						restaurants, where diners can rotate tirelessly in the night skies above
						American cities.)</p>
					<p>Architects' words and graphics encouraged their clients to phallic, urban
						displays, but occasionally architects might do more. A 1931 photograph shows
						seven men positioned in an irregular line, wearing cloth costumes banded
						with vertical or horizontal stripes. Tall cones or ziggurats cover their
						heads. Six levels of sharp-edged points culminate in an eighteen-inch rod
						atop the leader's mask, making his total stature nine feet. Are <pb n="111"
							facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_111.jpg"
						/> these tribesmen about to execute some primitive ritual celebrating male
						fertility? Below the photograph the caption reads: "Famous architects
						forming a miniature skyline of New York as they don their Beaux Arts
						costumes." The symbolic predilections of skyscraper architects have rarely
						been shown so clearly: urban professional men require a social occasion to
						turn themselves into a Dionysian landscape, a miniature version of the
						revenue-generating skyline they promote in their daily work.</p>
				</div>
				<div>
					<head>Reality: Urban Bankruptcy</head>
					<p>Whatever the myths about their phallic power, towers have proved economically
						powerful, but in a negative as well as a positive way. The glorification of
						the "procreant power" of the skyscraper serves to obscure the drain on
						municipal finances which towers create. Many urban historians have described
						the American urban downtown as a three-dimensional graph of land
						speculation, and locating clusters of towers is a quick way to guess at land
						values. Yet although tall buildings reflect the desire for maximizing
						private investment in a city based upon private land ownership, skyscrapers
						are not always profitable for their developers. For whom is skyscraper
						revenue generated? And how is it calculated?</p>
					<p>A need for immediate usable space is never enough reason for building a
						skyscraper. The construction cost of several low-rise buildings is almost
						always less than the cost of equivalent space in a skyscraper since
						expensive foundations and unusable space for elevators and mechanical
						equipment increase as the tower goes higher. Land cost, rather than building
						cost, is the justification: a very expensive piece of downtown land may be
						said to "require" a skyscraper to explain its price. <note>15. One example
							of the older literature describing economic "rationality" is William C.
							Clark and J. L. Kingston, <title level="m">The Skyscraper, A Study in
								the Economic Height of Modern Office Buildings</title> (New York:
							American Institute of Steel Construction, 1930). Clark and Kingston
							rationalize a profitable 75 stories. During this period 75 stories was
							often exceeded and the Empire State Building was under construction
							including 102 stories.</note> But the height of such a skyscraper will
						not be calculated on the city's needs, nor even on the current value of the
						land and the existing density of the area. Rather, a developer calculates
						the rising land values created by present and future skyscrapers, and makes
						a guess about how much more land speculation the neighborhood will bear.
						Developers who try to profit from the inflation of urban land values in this
						way almost always leverage their capital with large bank loans. Banks of
						course receive large amounts of interest. Developers therefore attempt to
						minimize their indebtedness by hastening the construction process (with the
						hazardous consequences for workers previously described) and by taking
						advantage of the federal tax structure and selling tax "shelters" (derived
						from real estate tax loopholes) to profit-making industrial
						corporations.</p>
					<p>While banks and large tax-sheltered, industrial corporations can always
						profit from the "procreant power" of the skyscraper, real estate developers
						hope for rising land values to justify their investments. Meanwhile,
						taxpayers bear the huge public costs of infrastructure and services for
						skyscraper developments. As Stephen Zoll argues in "Superville," "an
						increasing CBD (central business district) bulk becomes, itself, the
						principal sink in the municipal treasury." <note>16. Stephen Zoll,
							"Superville: New York, Aspects of Very High Bulk, <title level="m"
								>Massachusetts Review</title> (Summer 1973), p. 538. Zoll provides
							an eloquent discussion of political and economic factors in skyscraper
							construction with an extended bibliography. A former New York City
							employee, he sees the need for cities to reform their accounting systems
							and show the social costs of CBD density.</note> His persuasive
						historical analysis of high rise economics in New York explains why
						skyscraper construction is disastrous for the city's budget: municipal tax
						revenues never catch up with the spiraling costs of infrastructure which the
						city must provide. Attempts to control urban density through zoning or to
						raise taxes are usually met with corporate threats to leave the city
						altogether, which would cause unemployment. Caught between financial drain
						and the skyscraper and the threat of unemployment, the city loses either
						way.</p>
					<p>The tactics of land speculation and of transferring infrastructure costs to
						the city budget explain some of the reasoning behind the craze for
						skyscraper height, but there is still more to explore. Since the turn of the
						century many developers, aware of the economically and technologically
						"optimal" level of speculation on a given parcel of urban land, have chosen
						to build ever higher, and urban officials have accepted this. The builders
						have sacrificed high economic returns in order to enter a citywide,
						nationwide, or worldwide competition for height and prestige. <note>17. Many
							cities are engaged in such symbolic battles. Perhaps the most extreme
							ironies are the deliberately misleading understatements issued by
							builders during construction, in order to fool competitors into thinking
							that the new structure is less tall than it really will be. Suzanne
							Zwarun, in "The Calgary Tower," <title level="m">Interlude</title>
							(Oct.-Nov. 1976), p. 9, writes about Calgary's Husky Tower. The
							developers lied, she explains, boasting of 613 feet when all the time
							the structure was 626 feet. "The developers kept thirteen extra feet in
							reserve to protect the image of the Canadian west.....They knew some
							dirty rat would toss a few more feet on a project somewhere, just so it
							would out-tower the Husky Tower... Take that, San Antonio.</note> In
						terms of monopoly capitalism, although the tallest building in town may not
						be quantitatively efficient as office space or housing it is qualitatively
						efficient in promoting dominance over an urban region: towers are landmarks
						which can be seen from many distant viewpoints. They become symbols of
						corporate dominance over the city as well as the city's dominance over the
						region.</p>
					<p>The goal in building these extremely tall skyscrapers is psychological
						"procreant power" or awe. Awareness of the power this kind of architecture
						offers is reflected by the skyline of Washington, D.C., where skyscrapers
						over 90 feet tall are forbidden by law, so that the Capitol reigns as the
						highest structure. For many years, beginning in 1931, the Empire State
						Building was the tallest in the world; its pretentious name and an
						overbearing lobby mural showing the building dominating a map of New York,
						"the Empire State," enhanced its awesomeness. The World Trade Center rose
						higher in 1969. Its even more imperial name reflected an obvious attempt to
						supercede the Empire State Building. Yet in both cases symbolic posturing
						concealed unrented space, as these hulking developments were planned to
						exceed all calculations of needed office space in the city. Knowing that the
						World Trade Center was not fully rented, the owners of the Empire State
						threatened to build just enough extra structure to overtop them in the
						1970s, and triumph again. They didn't pursue this competition however, and
						as a result the 1976 version of the film <title level="m">King Kong</title>
						transferred the symbolic confrontation of the "natural" ape and the
						"civilized" capitalists from the Empire State, where it was set in 1933, to
						the World Trade Center, now the tallest structure in New York.</p>
				</div>
				<div>
					<head>Third Fantasy: "Tm Taking the Town!"</head>
					<p>While municipal governments struggle with the high costs of the skyscraper,
						and builders seek both financial and psychological "procreant power,"
						popular novels and films employ skyscraper imagery to create fantasies about
						sexual power and upward mobility for "ordinary" people in capitalist
						society. In the 1970s, women may be cast as executives or stockbrokers in
						these fables of success. A fashion advertisement compresses many strains of
						oppressive imagery—militarism, sexual power, false social mobility. Two
						models wearing suits with military tailoring pose holding statuettes of the
						Empire State Building. "Thinking positive... The way to make things happen
						in the city where everything's possible," reads the copy. "In soft, smokey
						officer's pink, I'm in my element, making strides and taking them.... My
						head's in the clouds and the view's terrific. Officer's pink in sleek new
						shapes, that are budding with potential. I'm perfectly suited to the pace of
						The City...." The dialogue concludes, "I'm <emph>taking the
						town</emph>...."</p>
					<p>In the movies of the 1920s and 1930s, it was more common to see women
						encountering skyscrapers as stage-struck young things coming to the big city
						to seek stardom. Sustaining individual competitiveness in times of
						collective difficulty, the most successful films of the Depression years, as
						Martin Pawley has observed, "dealt with the random access to power and
						influence in high society of 'ordinary' people." <note>18. Martin Pawley,
								<title level="m">The Private Future</title> (London: Pan Books,
							1974), p. 30.</note> Often such hopeful movie romances occurred in
						skyscraper offices, skyscraper penthouses, and skyscraper night clubs.</p>
					<p>In a production number from the 1933 film musical <title>42nd Street</title>,
						miniature skyscraper tips, glowing with colored lights, saluted Ruby Keeler
						as a sweet kid who managed to become a <pb n="112"
							facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_112.jpg"
						/> star, and the manipulation of skyscraper scale made her seem larger than
						life. A film critic recently commented on the effects of this process:
						"...life in New York is made more than bearable by the fine romance this
						city has always had with the movies. We have been exalted by a Hollywood
						version of ourselves that is often no closer to reality than this scene.
						This is Big Flick City— and welcome to it." <note>19. "New York's Love
							Affair with the Movies," <title level="j">New York</title> (Dec. 29,
							1975), p. 33.</note> Another Ruby Keeler film, <title>Go Into Your
							Dance</title> (1936), elaborates the cinematic process by which New
						York's hostile environment is "made more than bearable" by the association
						of the skyscraper with themes of personal success and imperialist corporate
						expansion. In a night club at the top of a New York tower, Al Jolson in
						blackface sings, "She's a Latin from Manhattan," about the fantasy of one
						"ordinary" person making it in the big city. Then Ruby Keeler and other
						performers in evening dress engage in a dance routine of world domination,
						climbing up and down a globe, tap dancing on various countries of the
						Northern Hemisphere to the tune of the title song with its catchy Depression
						lyrics, "When you feel sad and blue now, go into your dance!"</p>
					<p>While these examples show women succeeding, most American skyscraper
						fantasies have dealt with male success and mo bility, suggesting that an
						industrious young fellow may develop a personal empire of banks, shipping
						lines and factories, and build a skyscraper from which to look down on them.
						Architect Howard Roark, hero of Ayn Rand's novel, <title level="m">The
							Fountainhead</title>, and of the 1949 film based on it, endows this plot
						with an artistic rather than an entrepreneurial tone. Roark, played by Gary
						Cooper, stands for the survival of the fittest. A poor boy who made good, he
						fights the "creeping socialism" of his time by designing buildings for
						tycoons so he can develop his creative genius. At the film's end, Roark
						stands, remote and supreme, atop a new skyscraper he designed. He is joined
						there by Dominique Francon, an architectural critic who has been moved to
						ecstasy by an elevator ride up the side of this building. Roark "takes" both
						the town and the world of cultured society Francon represents; in fact,
						early in the story he rapes her and she is rapturous.</p>
					<p>Skyscraper restaurants and hotels trade on the renewal of this sort of
						cinematic fantasy. For the price of a drink or a meal, you can share the
						reflected power of a skyscraper location. One nationwide chain of penthouse
						restaurants advertises, "Make a top decision," <note>20. Make a Top
							Decision," Stouffer advertisement, <title>Mainliner</title> (United
							Airlines' Magazine, Nov. 1976), p. 100.</note> implying executive
						success for those who dine at at the top of a tower. Woody Guthrie made fun
						of such aspirations when he sang about the Rockefeller Center bar and grill,
						This Rainbow Room is up so high/ That John D.'s spirit comes a-driftin' by..
						" <note>21. Woody Guthrie, <title level="m">Bound for Glory</title> (New
							York: New American Library, 1970), p. 292.</note> but this did nothing
						to affect its popularity. Although the tip of a skyscraper is an especially
						charged location, the rest of the skyscraper also has powerful symbolic
						associations: one foreign resort hotel advertises its advantages to New
						Yorkers with a photograph of a phallic building superimposed on the
						bikini-bared torsos of three models. <note>22. Smack-Dab in the Middle,"
							advertisement for Rio Orthon Palace, <title level="j">New York</title>
							(Dec. 13, 1976), p. 139.</note> Whether they want to be chief executives
						or simply sophisticated playboys, clients of skyscraper restaurants or
						hotels are encouraged in their fantasies of power and control.</p>
				</div>
				<div>
					<head>Reality: Urban Oppression</head>
					<p>In the romantic world of popular films and advertisements, life in the
						skyscrapers is a whirl of money, power and sex. But as more and more people
						of all economic classes live and work in skyscrapers, the oppressiveness of
						these environments cannot be denied. In the 1960s and 1970s, community
						groups and workers' organizations began to detail the social and physical
						problems of skyscraper life. Injuries to workers building skyscrapers
						continued, accompanied by the problems created by the completed skyscrapers
						themselves.</p>
					<p>Ever more gigantic skyscrapers, when placed in urban plazas, could create
						dangerous wind forces (up to 175 m.p.h.) that hurled pedestrians off their
						feet. The towers themselves had to be designed to resist wind forces, but
						unforeseen difficulties could occur, as in the John Hancock Tower in Boston,
						where winds wrenched gigantic sections of mirror glass from the curtain
						wall, hurling them to the sidewalks below, terrorizing citizens with
						resounding smashes. Amazingly, there were no pedestrian fatalities.</p>
					<p>Urban residents also complained of enormous skyscraper shadows darkening
						whole neighborhoods and changing the ecology of local parks. Motorists and
						pedestrians found shadows were only half the problem with mirror glass
						buildings which, on their sunny sides, reflected blinding flashes of light
						into cars and homes. Community groups in San Francisco documented such
						difficulties when they fought construction of the Transamerica Building and
						other high-rises. <note>23. Greggar Sletteland and Bruce Brugmann, eds.,
								<title level="m">The Ultimate Highrise: San Francisco's Rush toward
								the Sky</title> (San Francisco: San Fran cisco Bay Guardian,
							1971).</note> In Boston, community groups have slowed but not halted
						construction of the Park Plaza project, whose shadows will darken the Public
						Garden.</p>
					<p>Workers inside the towers have added their complaints to those articulated by
						urban residents. Endlessly repeated sky-scraper floor plans reflect
						hierarchical design which allots interior fluorescent-lit spaces to
						predominantly female clerical workers, and exterior offices with natural
						light and views to predominantly male executives. New trends in office
						landscaping" using low partitions and plants may mute the most obvious
						effects of such plans, but light and space are always assigned according to
						status. In the John Hancock Tower, formal rules allow a senior vice
						president 406 square feet of space compared to a clerical worker's 55.
							<note>24. Susan Quinn, "My Desk Is Bigger Than Your Desk: Playing the
							New Office Status Game," <title level="j">Boston</title> (March 1977),
							p. 78.</note> If clerical workers constitute the majority of the towers'
						populations during the day, cleaners work predominantly at night—squads of
						men and women, poor white, black and foreign born workers. The best paid
						have extremely perilous daytime jobs washing windows or polishing facades,
						hanging on scaffolds as high above the streets as the ironworkers. The night
						shift works for lower wages, and the thrill of seeing the city lit up at
						night is, after all, the frisson of watching thousands of these cleaners at
						work.</p>
					<p>One of the most serious hazards to all workers in high-rise buildings, by day
						or by night, is fire. The skyscraper is constructed to resist fire, but if
						faulty wiring or a smoldering cigarette causes a blaze, then escape from a
						burning tower can be extremely difficult. Stairwells may fill with smoke,
						elevator shafts can act like <pb n="113"
							facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_113.jpg"
						/> chimneys, and traditional firefighting ladders cannot reach the upper
						floors. The Towering Inferno, a film about skyscraper conflagration, was
						playing in New York on the evening of Valentine's Day, 1975, when a
						moderately serious fire broke out in one of the two World Trade Center
						buildings there. Because the fire took place at night, most of the thirty
						injured were fire fighters and cleaners. Building officials managed to calm
						the thousands of daytime workers, who were unnerved to learn that New York
						fire codes had not been followed in the construction of the complex. But as
						skyscraper fires occur every few months around the country, one expects
						protests to increase. <note>25. Trade Center Fire Stirs Row," <title
								level="j">New York Daily News</title> (February 15, 1975), p.
							1.</note></p>
					<p>Since the skyscraper has been established in popular culture as a place for
						"taking the town," personnel in skyscraper offices are exposed increasingly
						to scenes of conflict at skyscraper tips, which are harrowing to the police,
						firemen, or passing workers who are involved. Bomb threats are not
						infrequent in corporate towers, and sometimes there are explosions and
						kidnappings as well. A <title level="j">Los Angeles Times</title> story for
						December 7, 1976, headlined "Gunman Holds Hostage Atop Skyscraper: Youth
						Gives Up After Antismoking Message Is Read On Radio," tells the sad story of
						a youth trying to attract attention in his crusade against lung cancer by
						"taking the town" with a weapon and a hostage.</p>
				</div>
				<div>
					<head>Fourth Fantasy: "Within the City, Without the City's Problems"</head>
					<p>In the movies the skyscraper was first presented as a place for dramatic
						encounters, celebrations, and awe, but as it became the standard building in
						the center city, the alienation of workers and residents increased. Pre-war
						fantasies of beautiful, shining tower cities—such as Hugh Ferriss' romantic
						renderings and Le Corbusier's plans for a Radiant City—led to extensive
						urban renewal programs in the 1950s and 1960s, when office towers and
						upper-class housing were joined by the grim, stripped-down tower in a field
						of asphalt as the preferred solution for public housing, a vertical filing
						cabinet for the urban poor. While such programs added towers to the already
						densely built-up cities of New York and Chicago, other American cities like
						Boston and San Francisco were "Manhattanized," developing predominantly
						skyscraper skylines for the first time. During these years the expanded
						activities of many American corporations and American architects abroad led
						to the exportation of the skyscraper, promoting corporate visibility and
						land speculation from Paris to Nairobi.</p>
					<p>The builders of this era succeeded in realizing the goal of an earlier
						generation of architects—a city composed largely of towers. As a result,
						they multiplied the economic problems of the metropolis and the social
						problems of skyscraper workers and urban residents, but the next generation
						of fantasizers never let up. Although the city was being turned into a field
						of towers, the supertower could still stand above it. Frank Lloyd Wright
						produced a plan for a mile-high skyscraper in 1956. Urban mega- structures
						proliferated on drafting boards in the 1960s, and in the 1970s, Paolo Soleri
						continues to lead the utopian skyscraper architects with endless plans for
						"Arcologies" with towers hung upon towers. (He uses the Empire State
						Building as a scale symbol to dramatize the size of structures many times
						its height.) The World Trade Center in New York, the Transamerica Building
						in San Francisco, and the Sears Tower in Chicago have all set new records
						for skyscraper height in these cities, but the quest for architectural
						dominance does not rest with the supertower which is the tallest building in
						town.</p>
					<p>The 1970s have brought a new kind of skyscraper which simply swallows up the
						city. Instead of a tower being presented as the typical building in the
						center city, it becomes a substitute for the city. More and more resources
						and activities are concentrated inside, while problems—wind, shadows, glare,
						utilities, transportation—are left outside for the municipality to deal with
						as best it can. In New York, Rockefeller Center anticipated this trend with
						offices, shops, restaurants, pedestrian spaces, and a skating rink. The
						World Trade Center is a city of 50,000 within a city of 8,000,000. With its
						own police force, newspaper, and restaurants, the complex is in many ways a
						private urban realm of government agencies and corporations set down in the
						public city of New York. This is a workaday complex, even more deserted at
						night than Rockefeller Center. Chicago's John Hancock tower, in contrast,
						functions as a 24-hour skyscraper city, providing housing as well as stores,
						restaurants and offices. Some residents may rarely emerge; others call the
						doorman to check the weather (which they live above) before they venture
						down from the clouds into the real Chicago below.</p>
					<p>The ultimate skyscraper development goes even further than these giant
						towers, incorporating urban landscape as well as residential, commercial,
						and recreational facilities into its interior design. John Portman's hotels
						in Atlanta, Cambridge, and San Francisco are hollow towers or pyramids
						advertised as being as exciting as (and implicitly safer than) the city
						outside. Interior courtyards and glass elevators allow for the traditional
						skyscraper observation to occur within rather than outside of the tower. The
						visitor experiences the thrill of riding to the top of the tower, but the
						views are carefully controlled vistas of the circumscribed, artificial,
						urban life within the hotel. Going them one better, two new Atlanta
						complexes include a lake and an ice skating rink as private skyscraper
						landscapes on their ground floors. Other build ings reveal the same
						privatization of landscape. The Ford Foundation Building in New York
						surrounds an interior garden. The penthouse farm of Stewart Mott, with its
						"natural" earth loaded onto a New York tower, shows that"nature" can be put
						on top of a skyscraper rather than left in a public place.</p>
					<p>As the American city is economically drained and environmentally destroyed by
						the skyscraper, developers of tower apartments, hotels, and office blocks
						sell back a limited, guarded version of urban life to those who can afford
						it. (This is, after all, what Disney and the'developers of "adventure parks"
						have done, selling synthetic American rural and small town landscapes.) The
						new, private tower cities exclude the poor, minorities, the aged, and the
						unemployed. Fortified by private police forces and by the best technology
						industrial security firms can supply, these private towers recall the
						militarism associated with the centennial obelisks and military watchtowers.
						They pose an extreme answer to urban oppression, selling the urban
						experience without an urban <pb n="114"
							facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_114.jpg"
						/> reality. They want customers to "take the town," and since the real town
						is too far gone, they offer a substitute.</p>
					<p>While urban escapism flourishes and builders construct skyscrapers of the
						present decade, satirists and science fiction writers have provided strong
						critical images of a world of urban towers being erected amid urban rubble.
						"Superstudio, a collective of Italian architects, mocks the trend in their
						"Twelve Cautionary Tales," with a design for a skyscraper factory stretching
						around the earth, churning out new towers as fast as the old ones cruble.
							<note>26. Superstudio, "Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas:
							Premonitions of the Mystical Rebirth of Urbanism," <title level="j"
								>Architectural Design</title> (Dec. 1971), pp. 737-742.</note> On
						the same theme, J.G. Ballard's story, "Build-Up, describes a world where
						high-rises cover the earth, except for blacked-out spaces where they have
						collapsed, and subways and high-speed trains are replaced by vertical and
						horizontal ele vators. <note>27. J. G. Ballard, "Build-up," in
								<title>Cronopolis</title> (New York: 1971), pp. 218-240.</note> For
						every such satirist, there are many more individuals planning new
						supertowers, perhaps justifying their projects with the rhetoric of a New
						York housing developer who advertises his expensive high-rise apartment
						block as being "within the city but without the city's problems." <note>28.
							The Century, ""Look Up, New York!" advertisement, <title level="j">New
								York</title> (Nov. 22, 1976), p. 45.</note> Skidmore Owings and
						Merrill offers the perfect architectural expression of this slogan in two of
						their newest commercial blocks on 57th and 42nd Streets in Manhattan. On
						each building, a concave facade covered in mirror glass manipulates the view
						so it appears from below that all the rest of the city is toppling, giving a
						doomsday twist to the perennial competition for skyscraper size as well as
						reinforcing the idea that the only city worth experiencing is inside, not
						out side, the skyscraper.</p>
				</div>
				<div>
					<head>Making Changes—Fantasy and Reality</head>
					<p>Criticizing the design of skyscrapers will not make them disappear, whether
						the criticism comes from a revisionist historian, an outraged citizen, or a
						pragmatic urban budget analyst. Patterns of corporate growth and patriarchy
						have determined the <pb n="115"
							facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_115.jpg"
						/> history of the skyscraper. The economics of urban land development today
						make it impossible to effect major changes in present building trends
						without a political revolution to socialize all urban land. In the meantime,
						at least some attempts in changing consciousness can begin. To understand
						the skyscraper and its place in the American city, we need the perceptions
						of all skyscraper workers and urban residents, women and men, as well as the
						specialized insights of architects, artists, and social critics.</p>
					<p>As a nation, we have exported the skyscraper around the world. Like
						pre-Copernicans who dismissed anyone who disputed the place of the earth as
						center of the solar system, today's American design professionals often
						exclude from serious architectural and urban discourse anyone who refuses to
						accept the importance of the skyscraper to "rational" urban design. Romantic
						notions of military preparedness and "manifest destiny, dreams of economic
						conquest and "survival of the fittest," fantasies of social mobility and
						sexual power, all have been marshaled in support of the skyscraper during
						the past century. All still flourish as skyscraper fantasies today. Designed
						first as urban monuments, then as typical urban buildings, then as synthetic
						cities, American skyscrapers attest to the power of fantasy to confuse our
						perceptions of urban reality. If we look up, we can read in the skyscrapers'
						looming shapes a reminder that our culture depends on false hopes of
						economic mobility as well as on rigid hierarchy, and that it thrives on
						social seduction as well as on architectural rape.</p>
				</div>
				<div>
					<p> I presented a preliminary version of this paper at the Woman's Building in
						Los Angeles in March 1974 at a conference on Women and Design. I would like
						to thank Whitney Chadwick, Robert Manoff, David Hodgdon, Peter Marris, Jean
						Strouse and Susana Torre, who made extensive com ments on early drafts, as
						well as Sheila de Bretteville, David Gordon, Rosaria Hodgdon, Jane
						McGroarty, and Gwen Wright, all of whom sup plied encouragement, material or
						important perspectives. Klaus Roesch did expert photographic research; Ets
						Otomo and Thea Muscat typed with precision and speed; members of the
						Heresies staff helped enormously with the final version. Copyright 1977.
						Please do not quote without written per mission of the author.</p>
				</div>
			</div>
		</body>
		<back>
			<p> Dolores Hayden is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute and assistant professor of
				architecture and history at MIT in Cambridge. This essay is part of a book in
				progress that deals with contemporary American cityscapes, entitled The Dream at the
				End of the Line.</p>
		</back>

</text>
</TEI>

From the Pink and Yellow Books

<epigraph>
					<p>The context of my writing is the performance situation which I set up at
						Artists' Space, the Leo Castelli Gallery, and the Whitney Downtown, where a
						video camera on a tripod behind me instantaneously transmitted the image of
						the letters, words, sentences as they were written to a video monitor across
						the room. The pink book was written in anticipation of performing, the
						yellow book is one-third performance and the blue and sub sequent books
						consist only and totally of material written in performance.</p>
				</epigraph>
				<div>
					<head>Pink Book</head>
					<p>Beginning at the beginning. Which is rock bottom. To be an artist who has not
						made any art for two years is very depressing. I have been very happy and
						absorbed. I had two perfect little bodies come out of my body. My body was
						huge and soft and full of milk. I held and nursed and fondled and fed and
						dressed and undressed and talked to and listened to my babies in an unending
						orgy of interdependence. Since Mira and Bran were born I have had no time to
						myself except sleep. But now I have been hired by Carl Andre to do this job
						of sitting for three hours a day in an old green space with a sign eight
						feet from my right eye about possibilities for art production.... So Carl is
						unwittingly my first patron (this work), my inspiration and my competition.
						My materials were paper and pen, now I have a typewriter here so that what I
						am doing now is part typing what I have already written and part writing now
						and it all has to do with the future. My economic resources are not vast,
						but neither are my needs. I figure I need $500 a month to support myself and
						half of two children which works out to $8.20 an hour if I work three hours
						a day five days a week which is all I want to spare right now from my
						children. The economic resource I have right now from this job is really
						time. The rest is all my subjective characteristics which will be manifest
						in the work which is to write whatever I am thinking publicly so that it can
						be simultaneously read. I am not being particularly clear, but this is the
						boring part where I am trying to elicit interest and support and
						collaboration or patronage or whatever. Already I feel a need to rewrite the
						beginning. This work is writing about this work.</p>
					<p>Writing about this work is this work. I am keeping my private journal
						publicly. I am the Delphic oracle. I am studying to be a shopping-bag lady.
						I am redefining art. I want to be in a public room with a typewriter and
						some machinery, maybe video, that could shoot a written page of 8½ by 11"
						paper and project the image of it on a wall or screen, but so it is easily
						legible. The room is somewhat dark except for a good light on my typewriter.
						I am writing down whatever I am thinking as fast and completely and well as
						I can. People come in and watch and read. There is a xerox machine somewhere
						so that xeroxes of pages may be made. I want to find out what and how I
						think. I want the publicness of it to interact with the process of finding
						out. I like using machines although I am not technically proficient and
						comfortable with them because they and art are the two metaphors for the
						mind that I am always bumping up against ... It isn't terror. It isn't joy.
						It's some sort of physical sensation which starts from the very top of my
						head and ripples down to my buttocks since I'm sitting. If I were standing
						it would ripple to my feet and make my insteps tingle. I'm stoned. If I
						thought it were terror I would be terrified. If I thought it were joy I
						might be still and meditative and happy, but that is different from this
						absorbed state of working that I am in. This is where there is that
						possibility of inarticulableness, either stoned or orgasming or making or
						con templating art or mystical experiences. There is the temptation of
						feigning speechlessness because of fearing the inadequacy of words. It can't
						be the words that are at fault, but my laziness.</p>
					<p>Outside there is a New York sirocco blowing hot restless moving air all
						around my legs and hair. It's exciting but disturbing since I'm wearing only
						a light short cotton dress and a pair of under pants. A pair of underpants
						is only one thing unlike a pair of mittens. I feel naked and lustful and
						agitated. I just thought about Gertrude Stein and Jill Johnston as heroines,
						but I didn't like to think it because it broke my other train of thought.
						I'd rather stay physical today. While digging in my purse for cigarettes (a
						man wouldn't have written that) I found a three-inch high light gray plastic
						horse, missing its flowing tail but complete with flowing darker mane and
						red indented nostrils and lips, that belongs to my children. Well, I bought
						it for them but it's questionable if children actually own things at all....
						I remember Lambie, a big soft stuffed white lamb I slept with, and later
						used to dust with my mother's perfumed talcum powder to make him white
						again. Funny that I thought he was male. I wonder when I started dividing
						the world that way and what arbitrary rules did I make up in unknown gender
						cases like toy animals and why.</p>
					<p>I did write a list of the first hundred words the babies spoke, but I haven't
						written them a journal of their daily activities. That's their bedtime story
						every night anyway so I suppose I could tape it and save it for them for
						eternity. “Once upon a time there was a little boy named Bran and a little
						girl named Mira and this morning they woke up very early and woke up their
						mommy and daddy and had eggs for breakfast and...." Every once in a while I
						get conscious of switching the order girl/boy, boy/girl, every alternate
						night, but often slide back to Bran/Mira several nights in a row. I even
						started telling it “Once upon a time there were two children, one named Mira
						and one named Bran... so that there wouldn't even be the boy/girl
						differentiation at all, but I'm afraid that they and I are already
						conditioned that way. Bran is masculine and Mira is feminine and they get
						more and more different every day. I hope that Mira won't hate me when she
						grows up. I hope that all the femininity that I have inevitably inculcated
						in her will be perceived as positive and valuable instead of the degrading
						powerlessness I have often been made to feel. The only way I can attempt to
						assure that is to make sure she grows up with good images of female power
						surrounding her, starting with my own self. And that means not totally
						answering her current demands of all my time and affection and attention so
						that I can go out and get myself powerful and make sure that I feel it and
						feel good about it. Which is difficult to do.</p>
					<p>Which I'm not pretending to do for her sake, but knowing that it is also for
						her makes me stronger. It's for Bran too but not as empathetically. For a
						long time I was taught to see my mother, and she was being convinced to see
						herself, as a mean, castrating, frigid, evil bitch. I don't blame her for
						that, but I would blame myself if I let Mira suffer the same thing. She will
						have to suffer something else. Some new pattern. In my mother's family one
						only talks about the women, at least as far back as the civil war, because
						they were the interesting ones and/or they lived longer.</p>
					<p>Anyway it is the female line that is traced. I read a diary of my mother's
						mother's mother's mother who was a southern belle named Emma Munnerlin,
						daughter of a rice plantation and slave owner, who married Charles Stocking,
						a yankee whose family had been long settled in the Connecticut River valley.
						He made a small fortune and then the civil war broke out and his brothers
							<pb n="94"
							facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_094.jpg"
						/> and cousins were all fighting for the union. He got wiped out financially
						and went catatonic for a while and then just psychotically morbid and
						depressed and afunctional. Emma's brothers and father were killed and ruined
						so she had to move north with two infant daughters and a crazy husband and
						support every body by giving french and music lessons to the local yankee
						daughters. She didn't complain in her diaries and they are not too exciting
						to read unless you already know the story and empathize a lot. She had been
						brought up with a personal slave companion, a girl a little older than
						herself, who brushed her long hair for her every morning and every night.
						They must have started out like twins or best friends or lovers and been
						trained to accept their difference in status. Her slave would have been the
						real child of the black woman who suckled her and the reason the woman was
						still full of milk for the little white baby. It is easier to imagine the
						rage that the black baby girl woman might have felt but probably didn't than
						to understand what subtle unconscious mixtures of interdependence and guilt
						and affection and tyranny Emma might have felt. Either way there's no record
						of it. Only imaginings based on experience or literature or movies. One of
						my best friends throughout high school was a very brilliant, angry, tricky
						and unfathomable black girl, one of the three or four blacks in the whole
						hypocritical elitist bourgeois school. I am a complex and conscious racist.
						I wish I weren't a racist at all, but l am a racist and a sexist and would
						probably be a capitalist imperialist if I had the chance. Fighting those
						things personally can either give or take away the strength to fight them on
						a political level....</p>
					<p>When Eva Hesse died, some friends of mine were moving into her place on the
						Bowery, and they knew how poor I was, and they said I could have any of the
						materials I could salvage from the heaps on the floor. I took inks and
						charcoals and water color sets and oilpaints and cords and tubing and
						strings and bits of rubber and everything. I figured it might be magic and I
						needed all the money I was making (working for a real estate agent in
						Brooklyn) for food anyway. I can never have too many bottles of
						half-evaporated foul-smelling multicolored Higgins ink and little wads of
						used art gum erasers. I carry it all with me from studio to studio. First to
						the 5th floor of 323 Greenwich St, then to Mulberry St, then to the country,
						then to the 4th floor of 323 Greenwich St, then to 319 Greenwich St. It
						comes in handy. Except for the horrid little nose masks for working with
						plastic.</p>
					<p>One time I used a whole lot of that material plus other stuff to make work in
						the woods. I was reading a lot about shamanism at the time and, while
						thinking, I would spend all day in the woods, one late summer into fall,
						making things from painted strings and painted wood and the trees that were
						there and the rocks and a brook and rubber slingshots and the works were
						visible enough to be photographed but invisible enough to be magical traps.
						Nobody ever saw them except the man I lived with and the man who used to own
						the woods and still walked his dogs there and perhaps an occasional hunter.
						I always wore red when I worked so I wouldn't be shot at. And big rubber
						boots so the copperheads and rattlesnakes wouldn't bite me. One weekend some
						people were coming to visit. A critic and a painter. I was very excited
						because I wanted them to come see my work. I worked hard on Friday afternoon
						in the woods (after cleaning the house and shopping and making beds etc.).
						They arrived for supper and it was dark. I woke early Saturday morning from
						excitement and anxiety and went walking to the woods to see everything once
						more alone before it became public and found everything I had done wantonly
						destroyed and stolen and dragged away and gone. This art is writing about
						this art.</p>
					<p>Writing about this art is this art. I love grammar but I don't understand its
						relation to meaning. If thoughts are born in words, as words, then the
						grammar is part of their initial existence. If thoughts are born not words,
						then the words come next and then the grammar is invented for them that puts
						them in the best order. My daughter has just invented or discovered a
						sentence that she says all the time which is the question “What is the
						-doing? -being any noun she knows, mommy, truck, daddy, brother, cookie,
						kitty, chair, table, toy, etc. I answer the question as best I can when it
						refers to anything capable of action (doing) but I get confused by "what is
						the cookie doing?" Sometimes I just say "it is" or "it is being a cookie" or
						'the cookie is sitting on the chair where Mira left it, waiting for Mira to
						hurry up and eat it before Poppy or Bran does" or "I don't know, Mira, what
						is the cookie doing?" to which she replies "UH." She has three answers to
						the kind of questions that I don't know the answers to myself, No, Yes, and
						uh. It is not grammar, anyway, which is only a structure, but the enormous
						number of words and then the mathematical infinity of combining any two,
						three, seven, twenty-four, thirty-three of them in one sentence that
						staggers the imagination....</p>
					<p>I've been thinking about Suzanne Harris' work <title>Locus Up.</title> It is
						experientially describable as a saint approaching death. It is made of sand
						and stucco walls. Suzanne looks to me like a combination of Joan of Arc and
						Saint Sebastian by various renaissance masters. I think she is very
						beautiful. That may not be relevant but I wrote it anyway. The saint
						approaches her death. She walks slowly in the sandy desert and the horizon
						melts away as the sand rises symmetrically on either side of her progress.
						She won't look back which is the only way to see the world and people and
						life she is leaving behind. She looks straight ahead at a narrow dark
						doorway cut into the mound of sand ahead. Inside is a cool, dark but short
						passageway that immediately and clearly opens into a bright round limited
						space. In the center of the bright round space, so huge that it takes up
						three-fourths of the space is an implacable white cube. The saint looks up
						into the blue sky above. She has left everything else behind and entered
						into her own metaphor for her soul, hermetic and infinite. She is not
						afraid.</p>
					<p>I wrote a very long list of all the women who I think are beautiful that I
						have been in the same room with. This is all related. I have been trained by
						art at the service of society to see certain things as beautiful: sunsets,
						flowers, stars, jewels, fruit, oceans, shells, trees, mountains, circles,
						colors, sunrises, and rocks and mothers with children and gold and sunlight
						and eyes and animals and glass and wood and shiny things; calligraphy and
						birds and structure and dragons and hills; stars and moon light, boats,
						flags, crucifixions and repetition and liquids, flight and the lives of the
						saints, altruism and patriotism and irony, rhythm and power and women. This
						list could be short if it were generalized and long if it were
						particularized. Very few of the women on my list are mothers, so why did I
						want to be a mother? I thought of two ways to be useful on this earth. One
						is to alleviate human suffering which would make one want to be a saint a
						scientist a revolutionary a doctor a politician a nurse a teacher a social
						worker a mass murderer a saint a mother an artist an entertainer a whore a
						mathematician or to add to human joy by being.</p>
				</div>
				<div>
					<head>Yellow Book</head>
					<p>It might be possible to believe that Chang Ching truly tried to revolutionize
						culture or the relationship between people and culture and that is why the
						bureaucrats who seem to be in power now are afraid of her. The New York
						Times says her revolu tionary operas were rigidly propagandistic but they
						see propa <pb n="95"
							facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_095.jpg"
						/> ganda as a pejorative word and what do they know anyway? It interests me
						that she was an actress and perhaps an adventuress and I imagine she has
						been made to suffer because Mao sent his loyal wife of the Long March, who
						bore him children given to peasants on the route and then lost, off to
						Moscow and then divorced her so he could marry young Chang Ching. My son is
						crying in his room. It is ten o'clock at night and he is supposed to be
						learning to go to bed without me lying beside him or singing songs or
						telling stories until he goes to sleep. If I do all or any of those things
						his father gets mad at me. If I don't he cries and his father gets mad at
						him and then at me because it is my fault he cries and it takes hours before
						everyone calms down because I get mad too. All that writing was interrupted
						by my going and lying down beside Bran and holding his hand and within five
						minutes he fell asleep. The other night both children were in the bathtub
						and I gave them two roses from the dozens given me at my performance to play
						with. I dethorned them first. I got in the bathtub with them and they were
						pulling the petals off the roses and we all decorated each other with rose
						petals. But I worry about Chang Ching. What if both she and Mao had been
						mythologized together, as an inseparable passionate toward each other and
						passionate to the revolution pair. He would seem less a father if he were
						also seen as a lover. Wasn't it Justinian and Theodora who ran such an ideal
						government and she had been a dancing girl or something. I know I used to
						think that all men were republicans and all women democrats. (My daughter
						sometimes declares that all girls have blue eyes and all boys have brown
						eyes, but now she has a blue-eyed doll with a penis so her faith is a bit
						shaken.) (She also knows her brown-eyed halfsister has a cunt which is the
						word used opposite penis in this house because vagina is just not one of my
						favorite words and cunt is despite its frequent misuse as an insult.) I was
						taught that men were republicans because they had to worry about money and
						they didn't like to give it to poor people and that women, because they
						didn't have to work and are naturally extravagant and generous and
						soft-hearted, are democrats and fuzzy-headed liberals. Also because women
						can afford to be idealistic and hopeful whereas men have to be cynical to
						survive in the jungle. There is probably no demographic truth in that, it
						was only my own family. I am registered and almost always vote as a democrat
						but my real party is the changchingist communist party, which is entirely
						feminist and attempts to integrate art and life in a truly revolutionary
						manner. This party has only just now been imagined by me and its inspiration
						is languishing under house arrest in Peking on the other side of this funny
						round world, but the...</p>
					<p>Our loft is very odd now. You walk in and are confronted with what is either
						called a what-not or a marbletop, being an elaborately carved wooden object
						with a mirror and knobs for hanging coats and bags and a marble tabletop for
						throwing keys and letters and a drawer for lint brushes and miscellany, very
						victorian and handy. Then you turn right into a wall giving you three
						choices. December 2nd. You see, yesterday was short and unsatisfactory.
						There was a chinese piano tuner and a dinner party, the place I live in was
						not described, a tiny baby and very cold weather. My eyes are heavy-lidded,
						always have been. I don't look innocent. I have of course been told that my
						eyes are beautiful, but they aren't. They are hooded and abandoned and of a
						blue more organic than mineral. They feel tired except when I remember they
						are round balls mostly inside my head. They are not just what they appear.
						Once I saw a short accompanying a movie which was made for german children
						to explain the physiology and physics of the eye. I especially remember the
						waves of color, the red short and angry jumping and the blue long and
						peaceful wavy like the ocean. Then they made gray rosebushes turn all red.
						Would that it were that simple. I hate mysteries. I would truly like to know
						everything. I'd like to begin with all the most important things and then
						all the subsidiary facts would just fall into place in an orderly way and
						wouldn't be worrisome instead of just accumulating a lot of small things and
						reasoning out their places to build a structure I cannot imagine the shape
						of until I have finished building. I would like some blinding flashes like
						Einstein had on the trolley. I would like not to have to work so hard and be
						so heavy-lidded. I would also like not to think that I have to read a lot of
						books, that there I might find enough details for my constructions. No, I
						scream at myself, that is not where it is found these days, politely hiding
						on a quiet page, you might find it in the bathtub with your body or in
						socratic dialogues with your peer group or even in a cultural manifestation,
						but, no, never just sitting in a book. </p>
				</div>
			</div>
		</body>
		<back>
			<p> Poppy Johnson is an artist who lives in New York. </p>
		</back>
	</text>
</TEI>

She Sees in Herself a New Woman Everyday

<head>SHE SEES IN HERSELF A NEW WOMAN EVERY DAY</head>
				<byline>MARTHA ROSLER</byline>
				<p> I called you today, we spoke a long time, you and I. You were in a good mood, a
					mellow one. You'd just seen your sister, your brother-in-law was having his
					eighty-first birthday. Your sister was married to him for 49 years this January.
					You asked me how my new house was, how my job was, did I have enough money
					Somewhere in the conversation you said, "After all, you're standing on your own
					two feet now.... You said it, you said I'm standing on my own two feet.... I
					remember when I was little, I'd want to stay home from school—I hated the
					yeshiva, I hated it for eight years, in the fourth grade I said, thank you God,
					thank you God, only four more years of this I used to want to stay home but you
					wouldn't let me. Daddy would let me stay home... but he would never want to tell
					you. He would tell me, "A lie of omission is not the same as a lie of
					commission. You used to come home from teaching school at three o'clock in the
					afternoon, but the yeshiva didn't let out until 4:30. You used to come in and go
					out again because you were very busy —you were a very busy woman — you had a lot
					to do. So—Daddy had a very simple solution. At five to three I would hide in the
					closet in my bedroom. He would hide me in the closet. I would hide there until
					almost four o'clock. I would hide in the closet so you wouldn't know I wasn't in
					school. The closet had a closet inside it —I know this is very peculiar now, but
					I didn't know it then. In the front part of the closet were a lot of clothes,
					and my father's graduation picture, his graduation from law school: St. Lawrence
					University, Brooklyn Law School, 1932. That meant he went to law school at
					night. I used to look at his picture in the closet — his diploma too — and
					wonder why it was there. In the front part of the closet with his picture were a
					lot of clothes. And in the back, past the first clothes rack, was a smaller
					closet, a creep-in closet. And in between the two, on a kind of sill, were a lot
					of shoes, old shoes. Your old shoes. You used to wear really serviceable, cheap
					shoes when you taught. Every day you wore sensible, cheap, serviceable and
					sturdy shoes but in the closet there were wonderful shoes —silver dancing shoes
					with high heels and buckles, silver dancing shoes from the 1920s or 30s, laced
					with thin silver laces. I used to wonder what they'd be like on your feet —you
					had such sturdy legs, sturdy, serviceable sensible legs.... I'd hide in the
					closet, and I'd look at your shoes, and I'd sit down among them and wait for you
					to walk out the door.</p>
				<p>You always thought that dressing up was very important. I'm sure you believe that
					clothes make the man—and the woman—but I always felt that shoes made the woman.
					You'd always dress me up for photos, in costumes that other people gave you. I
					always wore everyone else's hand-me-downs, it was such a sensible thing to do.
					You'd dress me up for photos, I remember. I remember one I still have it, or you
					do I was wearing a scotch plaid dress, a little blonde jewish girl with a dutch
					haircut in a scotch plaid dress —you made me hold it out in a semicircle as
					though I were squaredancing - and on my head was a little scotch cap. I was
					smiling, Ihad a tooth missing. I was wearing plain brown shoes, laced oxfords.
					You were not very interested in the shoes I wore for these photos. You always
					insisted I had to get sensible ones, so my feet would grow right, and I always
					wore Stride Rite shoes. But once you took me, when I was five or six, to get a
					pair of mary-janes that had—a buckle. Two buckles —that's it, they had two
					straps and two buckles. And the two straps lay across my feet like two hard
					fingers grip- <pb n="91"
						facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_091.jpg"
					/> ping them, in such a way that the bone between them was pressed upward. They
					pressed on this bone in the most peculiar way and I'd say, "mommy, mommy, mommy
					—these're, these're pressing on my feet, they're pressing on my feet and my feet
					are getting to be shaped funny. You said, "No, these shoes are good. They're
					expensive shoes. These are good shoes. These shoes are good for you. And so I
					have, on each foot, a bone that protrudes on the top, because of these shoes
					that pressed my feet into a funny shape.</p>
				<p>I remember once, the teacher called you from school and said, “Her boots don't
					fit. And you said, “But they're new boots." But those boots —those boots were
					someone else's boots, they were hand-me-down boots. I think they were
					hand-me-down boots, or maybe they were new boots. They were size 8. You always
					bought me things very large, so I would grow into them. Now you want me to dress
					my child in enormous clothing, so he'Il grow into it. These boots were size 8. I
					wore size 4. “Never mind," you said, "you'll grow into them." I wear size 6
					today. But you were sure I'd grow into those size 8 red rain boots. The teacher
					called to say, "She can't walk in her boots, they keep doubling up under her
					feet every time she takes a step; maybe she's got the wrong boots. You'd better
					come get her, it's raining out and she needs her boots."</p>
				<p>There were times that I recall being at your feet, on my hands and knees. From
					the time I was about 10, you and I used to be alone all week in the country
					house together, in your sister's country house, while Dad worked in the city.
					I'd always want to stay up at night and read. I read a lot, I loved to read. It
					was my one chance for privacy. All day I was away, swimming. I'd swim in the
					lake from early morning till lunch, hop out, climb up the bank, eat some lunch,
					and hop back in. Creeping, as it were, past you, doing the crawl. But I'd have
					to come out at dinner time and endure all through dinner. In the evening I just
					wanted to read. But you always wanted to go to bed early. There were four
					bedrooms in the house, but you always insisted that we sleep in the same one, so
					as not to get the others dirty. You always reminded me that it wasn't our house.
					So, at about 9:30 or 10 we'd have to get into bed, you into yours and I into
					mine, and turn out the light and go to sleep. But I'd never be tired. So I'd lie
					there, and count your breaths: Listen, and listen, and listen and... I'd
					sli-i-ide down the side of my bed, cre-e-ep on my hands and knees —holding the
					book, try ing to get out the door and into the bathroom, where I would read by
					the night light you always left burning. MOST of the time, though, you'd give a
					start and: "what's that, what's that?" You'd get up, see me, grab me, and knock
					me around. You used to threaten to get your shoe, but you always made do with
					your fist, some times you'd choke me a bit. When I got a little older I wasn't
					so interested in read ing; I'd set my hair every night with bobby pins and
					little rollers, the way my girlfriend Rosemarie taught me. On warm evenings we'd
					pretend to take a walk together but really we'd stand by the side of the road,
					in the driveway, with our chests puffed out and our bellies sucked in, in short
					shorts and little clingy jerseys, barefoot or in sandals. We'd strike
					bathing-beauty poses and stand stock-still, waiting for the boys in their
					low-slung souped-up cars to drive by and whistle and leer and make the sound of
					kisses. </p>
				<p> I remember once seeing your shoe, as it came up to hit me in the ear. I was
					about 17, and I thought you were out of the house. I was on the telephone to my
					girl friend. She was somebody I liked a lot but I was kind of afraid of her
					because she went to the High School of Music and Art where I'd wanted to go but
					you wouldn't let me because it was too far away —and you were probably right —
					it was too far away — to travel from Brooklyn almost to the Bronx —or so it
					seemed, that it was too far —anyway, I was on the phone, and I thought you had
					stepped out, and I was lying on the floor in my room, talking on my phone. It
					was my phone because once my brother called up to speak to me and Daddy answered
					the phone and he didn't know who it was, and he said, "Who is this?" and Larry,
					realizing that he didn't know it was his own son, said, "Is Martha home?" And
					Dad said, "WHO IS THIS?? WHY DO YOU WANT TO SPEAK TO HER? WHADDOYOU, WHADDOYOU
					WANT WITH HER?" ...And so Larry got me a phone; he was upset by that kind of
					behavior. He thought it was an invasion of privacy. I thought it was normal.
					Anyway...so there I was, on my phone, on my floor, smoking a cigarette. See,
					that was the kicker —I was smoking a cigarette. I was forbidden to smoke. I can
					understand, I'm a mother too, that you were protecting my health. Anyway, you
					came in and you saw me lying on the floor and you kicked me in the head. I'm
					sure you were aiming at the cigarette, but you got me right in the ear. Luckily,
					I wasn't deafened. However. I never spoke to that friend again.</p>
				<p>I used to really believe that shoes made the woman. I would buy a new pair of
					high-heeled shoes, you know the kind that people —that women — wore when I was
					growing up, do you remember those? Very high, very high pointy spike heels with
					pointy toes? And I'd buy 'em and I'd think, “Tonight's the night...a date...
					romance...dance... and I'd go out. And they'd be fine. They'd be fine for a
					while and then I'd realize they were pressing on a nerve; they always pressed on
					a nerve. They were fine in the shoe store, and I always thought, “These are
					better, these are different, these really feel fine, and I'd make it about, oh,
					a quarter of the way through the evening and I'd have to take my shoes off. Now,
					if there's one thing that a woman wasn't supposed to be, it was flat-footed on
					her own two feet; I mean, flats were for lower-class girls; nobody wore flats.
					And nobody walked around without their shoes, not if you wanted to keep your
					reputation. So there I was, spending the evening at a dance without my shoes and
					having to go home, through the streets of New York City, freezing cold in
					tattered stockings and I'd say..."I made that mistake again."</p>
				<p>Cinderella was oppressed; she was treated badly. She was given only crusts and
					scraps to eat and old cast-offs to wear. Often she had to go without shoes. She
					had to perform endless household chores. The chill and the lack of food made her
					light-headed. She was very unhappy and could only escape through daydreams.
					Nobody thought of training her to be a lady.</p>
				<p>Her stepsisters were given all the advantages; their every move was scrutinized
					and corrected, their diets were watched. They had the fanciest clothes, the most
					fashionable little slippers and boots. Their mother planned to make them ladies
					who would rise above her own station. When the prince's emissary brought around
					the mysterious lost slipper, Cinderella's stepmother made her older daughter cut
					off her heel and her younger daughter cut off her big toe to try to fit the
					test.</p>

<p>This piece was originally presented as a performance.</p>
			</div>
		</body>
		<back>
			<p>Martha Rosler is an artist living in Encinitas, California, who works with
				photography, video, texts and postcards. Her book, Service: A trilogy on
				colonization, is being published by Printed Matter Inc.</p>
		</back>

</text>
</TEI>

Homeless Women

<head>Homeless Women</head>
				<byline>ANN MARIE ROUSSEAU</byline>
				<p> Who are the homeless women huddled in the doorways, train stations and parks of
					New York City? Called shopping-bag ladies because they carry all their
					possessions in bags, they roam the streets—alone, isolated and without the basic
					necessity of shelter. In a world where myths of marriage and motherhood tell us
					women are protected in the home, these women symbolize our worst fears about
					women who do not, or cannot, fit into a society that values production and
					work.</p>
				<p>The Shelter Care Center for Women is a temporary residence for homeless women in
					New York City. It costs the city over 560 a day per woman to keep 47 women at
					the Shelter. This pays for the rent of the building and for a full-time staff of
					50 who provide social work and other services.</p>
				<p>In connection with a community arts project sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum,
					I have been teaching an art class at the Shelter. The following excerpts are
					from taped conversations with some of the women staying there. The photographs
					were taken by the women who participated in my classes.</p>
				<p>Adele Raiffen, found sleeping on the subways, was brought to the Shelter by the
					police. She comes from Boston, where her father was a lawyer, and unlike many of
					the Shelter women, Adele went to college. She majored in religion and managed
					her life reasonably well until her last year in school. </p>
				<quote> When I started reading the New Testament I certainly wasn't seeking God and
					probably 95 percent of my fellow students weren't either. But I began hearing
					the words of Jesus and I saw that I was not cleansed in the eyes of the Lord. I
					started to get really upset and I found I couldn't cope. It was at this time
					that l decided to jump out of the window. This was pretty dumb, but it was a
					very definite decision. I had definitely given up on life. I thought I was mad.
					I ended up staying in the local infirmary for a while and then they put me in a
					mental hospital for two years. </quote>
				<p> About five years ago a government policy turned out thousands of people from
					state mental hospitals in the name of hu manity and reform. People who had spent
					years passively being cared for in institutions were abruptly left to fend for
					themselves on welfare. </p>
				<quote> When they let me out I moved into a hotel and lived there for a number of
					years. I had a great many emotional problems and a chronic drinking problem that
					had been going on for five years. I <pb n="86"
						facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_086.jpg"
					/> was pretty unhappy. Everyone was a chronic alcoholic like myself and the
					discipline wasn't very great. Most of the people came and went out of the local
					hospital. </quote>
				<p> Most of the women cannot find or hold jobs. Often they are placed in welfare
					hotels where their checks are lost or stolen or they are unsuccessful in
					budgeting their money. These city-financed hotels are poorly kept places of
					despair and misery. Pimps, addicts and junkies hang out in the lobbies and the
					women fear being robbed and assaulted. Worst of all is the loneliness. There are
					few programs to reach the many people isolated inside their rooms. Without
					treatment or any kind of community or family support, problems of mental illness
					intensify. </p>
				<quote> I felt that I had already accepted Jesus as the truth and the only
					salvation, so I was drawn to visit a church fellowship house that was nearby.
					This was a nationally organized Christian fel lowship house where people lived
					together in very tight communal situations where they could receive the word of
					God. Pretty soon I decided to move in. It was a good move. They knew that living
					together in a tight situation often makes somebody grow very fast, and I did
					that for a while. I grew very fast, but after two weeks l had to go into the
					hospital again.</quote>
				<quote>When I came out, I decided to go back to this same house and things went
					pretty well until two weeks later when I started another drinking binge by
					drinking all of the vanilla in the house. When I did that, I ran out and ran
					down the street and I thought, "Well, I've replaced vanilla bottles on a Sunday
					morning before. This is no sweat. This is real easy." And that was it. I
					couldn't stand one more moment of hunting down vanilla bottles. I guess it was
					the love l had for other people. So I prayed, "God, I'm too tired to drink
					anymore. You just gotta do something about it, and I turned around and I ran
					home and told my pastor about it. From that day forward I didn't take a drink in
					that house.</quote>
				<quote>After a while I decided to leave that house because I had obviously been
					cured and no longer needed the fellowship of Christian people. I thought I could
					do well enough on my own and I wanted my own life. I came to New York to visit
					friends and I stayed with my sister and her family.</quote>
				<quote> Ithink I was pretty unhappy at the time. Pretty lost at sea. think a lot of
					people come to New York to be alone with them- selves or something; to cut off
					ties with people they know. It's kind of a self-destructive thing to do, to come
					to New York without any concrete plans and I might have been doing that.</quote>
				<quote>My sister is pretty happily married and sometimes we've been very close, but
					I was not finding a way to live with the contentions going on around me. I
					wasn't able to cope with people who had never met Jesus. My sister was one of
					those people, and it became very hard for me to cope. You see I'm basically a
					back-sliding Christian. For about a year now I've felt God's kind of deserted
					me, but His word is still pretty faithful, and in my sister's house I wasn't
					finding a way to live, so essentially I guess I ran away. I just upped and left
					one day. </quote>
				<p> While it is estimated that there are as many as 3,000 home less women wandering
					around New York City, the Women's Shelter has only 47 beds. Last year more than
					2,000 women were turned away. Close to 800 were accepted and stayed anywhere
					from one day to several months. </p>
				<quote> I stayed in the park and I wandered around for a I don't remember how I
					found the Shelter. Maybe through the grapevine. Iwasn't thinking too clearly
					then. Im hoping to get on welfare, or maybe I could get a job as a salesgirl
					somewhere. For tunately or unfortunately I don't drink anymore. It doesn't seem
					to be a problem. There are too many other things to occupy my mind. Occasionally
					when I get desperate, I head for a bar or something, but usually Istop in
					midstream and change my mind. </quote>
				<p> The goal of the Shelter is to provide a short-term residence where women can be
					helped and then returned to the community or placed in an appropriate
					institution, but the recidivism rate runs to 50 percent. The women do not get
					the kind of help they need at the Shelter or anywhere else. </p>
				<p> Selma Lyons is 46. She has spent most of her life in mental institutions or
					nursing homes. </p>
				<quote> You see the thing was like my mother. She had a problem drinking, and she
					didn't get along with my dad. So when they split up the family they just made
					the kids wards of the court. There were nine of us and I was right in the
					middle.</quote>
				<quote>My younger brothers and sisters went to the orphan home, but I got sent up.
					You know youre supposed to get a trial of some sort before they send you to
					state hospital, but I didn't get none.! never seen the judge. They just decided
					to send me up. They didn't say why. They didn't say much of anything. They just
					said something about going for a long nice ride and enjoying the scenery. You
					know they don't tell you nothing. They took me up there and when we got there
					they told me where it was after they locked me up.</quote>
				<quote>After I got there, the doctors that talked to me got maddel than hell for
					them to bring me there because I was only fourteen and the patients that were
					there were mostly either forty or fifty. <pb n="87"
						facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_087.jpg"
					/> and he said he liked to have the person that sent me there for one hour and
					call him dirty names. Most of the patients there were old people. I was the only
					young one. That makes a big difference being a young person and then being with
					so many old people.</quote>
				<quote>I stayed in the hospital that first time three or four months until they
					asked me a lot of questions and they figured I was okay. Then they sent me back
					to a nursing home in Quincy. See, in Illinois when people get out of state
					hospitals sometimes they send them to nursing homes with full privileges and
					all.</quote>
				<quote>But my mother started coming round and asking for my money and stuff. She
					told me to come over and see her, so I went and brought her a sack of groceries.
					She didn't like me staying at the home, and I just figured, well, I'll stay at
					my mother's. So I stayed at my mother's house and all of a sudden a policeman
					came down saying he was going to take me to jail because I was still a ward of
					the court, see. And I wasn't supposed to be at my mother's. Course I didn't know
					cause the law don't tell kids anything anyway.</quote>
				<quote>So they took me to jail and they had a new judge. Came in. He said, "You
					ain't guilty of nothing, there's no charges against you," and he said, "I got
					some real nice people where you can live with them, real nice, that'Il treat you
					right, treat you decent and everything. So he introduced me to the Parsons, see,
					and the Parsons decided to get me a job. He was a guy that worked for the state
					and he went around helping teenagers get jobs. He just loved teenagers, working
					day and night to help them. He got me a job at the Pepsi-Cola plant working on
					an assembly line sorting bottles. Istayed there about four months and then the
					boss said l wasn't able to keep up, you know, work fast enough. So he said that
					being he liked me he'd keep me a month longer because he hated to, you know, see
					me go.</quote>

<p>The only alternative to the streets available for many people is an
					institution.</p>

<quote>Later on when I was older they let me go to St. Louis to live with my mother
					in the boarding house she ran. I lived there for a while but my mother had a
					drinking problem. I couldn't understand her too well. So one night I decided to
					go to Kansas. When they picked me up they found out that I once was at the state
					hospital by questioning, so they kept me in the hospital in Kansas for three
					months and then they transferred me back to the hospital in Illinois.</quote>
				<quote>At the hospital they sent me out to a workshop where I folded bags and put
					them in a little packet. I got $18 a month but l didn't keep my money. I did
					good deeds. See, I lived on a ward where nobody had soda or cigarettes, nothing.
					I'd go out and bring back somebody a jar of coffee and we'd have coffee and play
					cards. I don't like no kind of institution but I figure if l'm going to live
					there I'm going to do good to the patients.</quote>
				<quote>One time I decided to go to San Francisco. I cashed in my Social Security
					check and got a bus. It was a nice trip. I went to look at the ocean, sat on the
					beach for a while and had me a cheese sandwich with several different kinds of
					cheese and French bread. That was real nice, but when I was in the bus station I
					left my purse on the bench and went over to look out the window. When I came
					back it was gone, so I didn't have another cent left to me. After a while a
					policeman came over to me, real nice, and he says, "Anything I can do for ya?" I
					says, "No, I don't want to tell you my problems. I don't want to cause you no
					trouble, but back home everybody talks about California. How great California
					is." He said, "You'd better believe California's great." He said, "We help
					people, the people help us. He said, "Now is there anything I can do for you?"
					and I told him that I lost my purse and he said, "Well, I'll just send you over
					to this Catholic place. They'll keep you till your check comes, or else they'll
					send you to another place till you can get back on your feet."</quote>
				<quote>So I went over to the Catholic place and they kept me for a while, but then
					they sent me back to Illinois, to the home.</quote>
				<quote>It's horrible in the home. When they put you in an institution they
					practically destroy your life completely. When you're young and you have to be
					around people that are old. You figure you can be classified, say, with them. It
					gets to you. Here I am. Ain't done nothing. Ain't been nowhere. Course I've done
					a few things, but if I have to spend all my life in institutions, well, I won't
					be putting nothing into life. I won't be getting nothing out of life.</quote>
				<quote>One of the patients in the home used to talk about San Francisco, so l'd been
					to San Francisco, and there was another patient who talked a lot about New York,
					so I thought, well, I'll go to New York. l'd always heard about a store called
					Macy's. I heard it was a block long and I thought l'd like to see that!</quote>
				<quote>The buses had a 550 special. Usually it costs about $100 to go to New York,
					but they had a special where you can go anywhere for S50 or less. I thought I'm
					not going to have this bargain <pb n="88"
						facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_088.jpg"
					/> probably never again in my life so I might as well take it now. I cashed in
					my SSI check again and came to New York.</quote>
				<quote>I didn't pack much. I just took what I wanted to take and left everything
					there. I didn't tell no one, cause every time you'd start to talk about doing
					something they'd talk you out of it. So I never mentioned nothing. Every time
					anyone gets inspired to do some thing or be something at the home they'd talk so
					much that you're not going to be anything or do anything, and that's why you'd
					give up. So I never talked much.</quote>
				<p> There are no outreach programs to contact the many homeless women who don't know
					about the Shelter. When a woman does not qualify or when the Shelter is full,
					the only alternative for someone without funds or a place to stay is the
					Emergency Assistance Unit of the Department of Social Services. There, a woman
					can sit on a chair all night. </p>
				<quote> My money was stolen on the bus I think. See, I forgot to close my purse and
					I left it on the chair next to me, and there was a kid right across. Later on,
					about ten minutes later, I was gonna smoke a cigarette and I looked in my purse
					and the money was gone. All I had was a dollar bill.</quote>
				<quote>When I got to New York I went up to an officer and told him my money was
					stolen, so he referred me to a place where people sit all night long. It was a
					small room with people sleeping on chairs. The next morning they sent me to
					welfare, but welfare refused to help me because I was on SSI. Eventually I found
					the Women's Shelter, I couldn't get in at first, but I did after a few days. </quote>
				<p> Homeless men are treated differently. At the Men's Shelter they are given chits
					entitling them to a free meal and a flophouse bed. Although the flophouse hotels
					may not be as institutionally neat and clean as the Women's Shelter, there is
					room for thousands of men. They are almost never denied a bed. </p>
				<p> At one time if a woman with children found herself without a place to stay, she
					was allowed to keep her children with her in a family shelter. Now, a mother who
					needs help and has nowhere to live must put her children in placement until she
					can get on welfare or find some means of supporting herself and her
					children.</p>
				<p>Hanna Schaeffler was born in Brooklyn. She was adopted when she was two and knows
					nothing about her real parents. Her adoptive parents separated when she was
					five. </p>

<quote>At first I lived with my mother. She was having a great many personal
					problems at that time and couldn't cope with anything. so when I was in the
					sixth grade she sent me to Bay Shore to live with her sister. That was a nice
					home life for me and I stayed there for two years. I don't really know what my
					mother's problems were. She couldn't straighten out her life, her bills, her
					boyfriend.</quote>
				<quote>When I came back she had gotten rid of her boyfriend, but something had
					happened to me. I didn't want to go to school be cause I was getting pimples. I
					became silent and quiet and wouldn't take a bath or anything. My mother didn't
					understand then. It got to the point where I practically couldn't do anything
					and my mother didn't make me. When I went to school I kept dropping.to the
					bottom. I had no interest. I was a very confused person.</quote>
				<quote>My mother later signed me out to go to work.</quote>
				<quote>I lived at the Simmons House for a few years and during that time I had
					several office jobs, but I was never really happy.I started becoming depressed
					and having a lot of problems. It was at that time that I met the man l've been
					living with for the past three years. He used to hang around the Simmons House
					looking for girls. When I met him, I had just left my last boyfriend and was
					very lonely. He insisted I move in with him right away. I didn't want to but I
					gave in. I was very weak then. I had no mind of my own and would allow myself to
					be led any way withou really knowing what I wanted.</quote>
				<quote>Things were okay for a while, but then I got pregnant and that messed
					everything up. I had to give up my job and I began staying home. My boyfriend
					really wanted to have me like maid in the house and to have other women outside.
					Sometimes he would stay away the whole weekend and not say anything about where
					he had been. At night I never knew if he would be coming home or not. When I
					asked him what he did, he said it was none of my business. Getting women seemed
					to be all he thought about. I once heard him telling his friends that his
					biggest dream is to get an answering service and to come home and turn on his
					answering service and then go out with whoever he wants.</quote>
				<quote>I felt like I was going crazy because I had no outlet. My only girlfriend is
					in the building, and then I found out that my boy friend was trying to turn
					everyone against me. He was telling her that I never did anything, even the
					laundry, and that I was lazy and good for nothing. When I found that out, I was
					so hurt about the way he spoke about me, about the way he was getting a car and
					locking me in that I didn't know what to do.</quote>
				<quote>Everything got to be too much. That's when I tore up the furniture. One
					morning I took a knife and tore it all to pieces. couldn't take it anymore. I
					tried to get out, but there was no choice. Ihad stood it for as long as I could
					and then that morning I ripped everything to shreds. My mind was very calm. I
					don't even remember where my little boy was at that moment. Some times I wonder
					what he saw. I know he knew something was up because later I saw him looking at
					the couch, just staring, like he knew something was wrong.</quote>
				<quote>The police said I should go see a social worker, but I didn't know where to
					go. After that my boyfriend was saying he was <pb n="89"
						facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_089.jpg"
					/> going to beat me up. Iheard about a free community legal service voar where I
					lived so I went over there. They told me I should go to family court. It was
					difficult. Iwas very mixed up and I didn't know what to do. I did a lot of
					things wrong. I took out a paternity suit and they took away my birth
					certificates. I was twing to get myself on welfare at the same time—going from
					place to place carrying the children. I couldn't get welfare because they said I
					was being supported by my boyfriend and then I didn't have my birth certificates
					because they were at the court, and I was running all over waiting in this place
					and that one with the babies in my arms.</quote>
				<quote>The social worker said I should come to the Women's Shelter and put the boys
					in foster care until I got more straightened out, solthought that would be the
					best thing to do. It was pretty hard to give them up. I placed them to get
					self-sufficient.</quote>
				<quote>The first time I got to visit my boy after he was placed in foster care was
					like I was in another world. When I saw him I suddenly couldn't even hear what
					the people around me were saying and I was looking at him. Then I had to go into
					the bathroom to hide my crying.</quote>

<quote>My oldest boy acted shy at first, like he didn't recognize me, but then I
					played with him a little and he was better. They say that the first few nights
					he didn't eat or sleep at all. They had a lot of trouble with him because he was
					so upset.</quote>
				<quote>The little baby seemed to be okay. He didn't really recognize me but
					sometimes I used to make a funny little noise at him with mythroat, and he
					always made the noise back. This time when I made the noise he looked at me and
					he made it back, so I guess he did recognize that.</quote>
				<p>Some women spend lifetimes in a cycle moving from mental hospitals to the Women's
					Shelter to welfare hotels, to the street and back into a hospital or the
					Shelter. For other women, there is perhaps a small hope that through luck or
					endurance they will eventually carve out a reasonable life for themselves. These
					are the women who have left within themselves some resources of strength and
					enough will to fight for the scraps of help offered by individuals and social
					agencies.</p>
				<p>Adele was placed on welfare and expects to go into a welfare hotel.</p>
				<quote> I'm not very happy about going into the hotel, but there aoesn't seem to be
					anything else I can do. I'll be okay as long as my drinking problem doesn't come
					back. I'm waiting for the will ofthe Lord. </quote>
				<p> Selma would like to get a job, but with little education and no skills, she has
					little hope. </p>
				<quote> If I can't get an apartment and a part-time job in New York, I guess I'll
					have to go back to the home. I don't know if I'll be able woget a job or not.
					It's like you have to give up or something. Like there's nothing you can do.
					It's practically impossible for me to get out of this situation. My only choice
					is to be in the home with bunch of mental patients in a workshop, and that's not
					a real job. That's nothing. There ain't really nothing for me, just institu </quote>
				<p> Hanna is struggling to establish a home for her children. </p>
				<quote> I won't get them back until I have something to stand on—a job. The
					children's agency is helping me. Maybe I could get into a nurses aid program or
					something, as long as I don't have to go back to him. I never want to get
					married or to live with any man again. I don't think men are necessary for me. I
					just want my children back and to have a home and a dog and to go to church on
					Sunday. The whole bit. I hope I'll get everything straightened out. I'm tired of
					suffering and going around in circles. </quote>
			</div>
		</body>

<back>
			<p> Ann Marie Rousseau is an artist living in New York. She has worked at the Woman's
				Shelter for several years and is a member of the anti-catalog committee. The
				photographs reproduced here will be exhibited with others by women from the Shelter
				at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this summer. </p>
		</back>

</text>
</TEI>

Prosepoems for Old Women

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-model href="http://www.tei-c.org/release/xml/tei/custom/schema/relaxng/tei_all.rng" type="application/xml" schematypens="http://relaxng.org/ns/structure/1.0"?>
<?xml-model href="http://www.tei-c.org/release/xml/tei/custom/schema/relaxng/tei_all.rng" type="application/xml"
	schematypens="http://purl.oclc.org/dsdl/schematron"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LEAF-VRE/code_snippets/refs/heads/main/CSS/leaf.css" title="LEAF" ?>
<TEI xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0">
   <teiHeader>
      <fileDesc>
         <titleStmt>
            <title>Prose Poems for Old Women</title>
            <author>May Stevens</author>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Eowyn Andres</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2024-Present)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Haley Beardsley</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2021-2024)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Lyndon Beier</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2023-Present)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Erica Delsandro</persName>
               <resp>Investigator, editor</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Mia DeRoco</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2023-Present)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Margaret Hunter</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2021-2024)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Diane Jakacki</persName>
               <resp>Invesigator, encoder</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Sophie McQuaide</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2021-2023)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Olivia Martin</persName>
               <resp>Editor, encoder (2021)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Zoha Nadeer</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2022-2023)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Bri Perea</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2022-2023)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Carrie Pirmann</persName>
               <resp>Editor, encoder (2023-Present)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Valeria Riley</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2024-Present)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Ricky Rodriguez</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2022-2023)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Roger Rothman</persName>
               <resp>Investigator, editor</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Valeria Riley</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2024-Present)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Kaitlyn Segreti</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2021-Present)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Maggie Smith</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2021-2024)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Maya Wadhwa</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2021-2023)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Kelly Troop</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2023-Present)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Lucy Wadswoth</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2022-Present)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Anna Marie Wingard</persName>
               <resp>Editor (2023-Present)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <respStmt>
               <persName>Olivia Wychock</persName>
               <resp>Graduate Editor (2024-Present)</resp>
            </respStmt>
            <funder>Bucknell University Humanities Center</funder>
            <funder>Bucknell University Office of Undergraduate Research</funder>
            <funder>The Mellon Foundation</funder>
            <funder>National Endowment for the Humanities</funder>
         </titleStmt>
         <publicationStmt>
            <distributor>
               <name>Bucknell University</name>
               <address>
                  <street>One Dent Drive</street>
                  <settlement>Lewisburg</settlement>
                  <region>Pennsylvania</region>
                  <postCode>17837</postCode>
               </address>
            </distributor>
            <availability>
               <licence>Bucknell Heresies Project: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0
                  International (CC BY-NC 4.0)</licence>
               <licence>Heresies journal: © Heresies Collective</licence>
            </availability>
         </publicationStmt>
         <sourceDesc>
            <biblStruct>
               <analytic>
                  <title>Patterns of Communicating and Space Among Women</title>
               </analytic>
               <monogr>
                  <imprint>
                     <publisher>HERESIES: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics</publisher>
                     <pubPlace>
                        <address>
                           <name>Heresies</name>
                           <postBox>P.O. Boxx 766, Canal Street Station</postBox>
                           <settlement>New York</settlement>
                           <region>New York</region>
                           <postCode>10013</postCode>
                        </address>
                     </pubPlace>
                  </imprint>
               </monogr>
            </biblStruct>
         </sourceDesc>
      </fileDesc>
   </teiHeader>
   <text>
      <body>
         <pb/>
         <div>
            <pb n='84' facs="https://leaf.bucknell.edu/sites/default/files/2025-02/heresies02_84.jpg"/>
            <head>Prose Poems for Old Women</head>
            <byline>May Stevens</byline>
            <lg>
               <head>SITTING STILL</head>
               <l>Some people died who never died before she said</l>
               <l>They died iust now she said readine The Times</l>
               <l>Her skin was pink her flesh concealed the bones</l>
               <l>inside She pretended she was a chair</l>
               <l>hoping death would flash past sat still as a sofa</l>
               <l>A dress laid over two shoes neatly placed.</l>
            </lg>
            <lg>
               <head>WOMAN WAITING</head>
               <l>My mother sits at a window watching the field.</l>
               <l>When I come after six months, a vear, she waves.</l>
               <l>Moving from chair to bed to table she opens the</l>
               <l>door to the field, waits to receive words of praise</l>
               <l>and affection. The days of no figure crossing the</l>
               <l>field have moved to this moment. We are together.</l>
               <l>We drive off. She has nothing to say. She is humming.</l>
            </lg>
            <lg>
               <head>ALICE DICK b. NEW BRUNSWICK. CANADA 1895</head>
               <l>As children in Chatham Alice and her sister Mary</l>
               <l>went for picnics on a boat down the River Miramichi</l>
               <l>as far as Bav de Vin and Burnt Church where the boat</l>
               <l>turned around. They caried sandwiches and lemon</l>
               <l>meringue pie homemade by Nelle Morn who hooked</l>
               <l>five or six rugs a vear, took in laundry, baked</l>
               <l>and sold fresh bread in herstore, made all the</l>
               <l>familv s clothes and delivered milk to her neishbors.</l>
               <l>Three of her four children were girls but they never</l>
               <l>learned to do allthe things their mother did. She</l>
               <l>had no time to teach them.</l>
               <l>Alice was in the second grade when Nellie Morn threw</l>
               <l>a log from the top of the woodpile into Alice's left</l>
               <l>eye. Her blue dress turned red.</l>
               <l>Alice was twelve when her father died. She went to work</l>
               <l>as mothers helper for the Snowballs and the Steeds</l>
               <l>who lived in the big house on the hill. Thev owned the</l>
               <l>pulp mill.</l>
               <l>Later she came to Boston, got a job in a Chinese</l>
               <l>restaurant where she waited on True N. Stevens half-</l>
               <l>owner of Stevens and Greene Groceries and his boy Ralph</l>
               <l>who flirted with her. Asked what A.D. on the bill stood</l>
               <l>for she said after dinner. They got married. She was</l>
               <l>twenty-four. I was the first of their two children</l>
               <l>the one who lived.</l>
               <l>She is nearly eighty now. She has a pink-gummed smile</l>
               <l>incredibly innocent and sweet without the least inflec-</l>
               <l>tion of twenty vears confinement in the back wards of</l>
               <l>state mental hospitals. The light in the one eye that</l>
               <l>sees has never gone out.</l>
            </lg>
            <lg>
               <head>OLD WOMAN BATHING</head>
               <l>Loosened strands slip down deep divided back.</l>
               <l>Buttocks shelfslides to creasing thighs. Knees</l>
               <l>keep a partial crouch. Belly slings body center</l>
               <l>forward over a hairless pouch. She lifts each breast</l>
               <l>soaping the smell of age. She (matter self-propelled</l>
               <l>mushrooms pink and lavender, lustful, greedy, feeding)</l>
               <l>steps into air, hands stroking space, trusting someone</l>
               <l>is there to towel her drv, pin remnant hair, give back</l>
               <l>her name, her watch, her storv. She loves being clean</l>
               <l>but who has time to wash her every day? Is she a baby</l>
               <l>with a future? She loves hair dresed but fears over</l>
               <l>handling may make it thin. Dampish stil, flushed,</l>
               <l>talced, her body blooming, she swings foot, hums</l>
               <l>nightgowned beside the bed, waits for milk and pills.</l>
               <l>Glasses folded under pillow, sheet clutched high,</l>
               <l>one hand slipped between her thighs, she sleeps a</l>
               <l>sleep she will denv, in tongues converses with</l>
               <l>familiars, unshareable. No she did not speak she lies</l>
               <l>keeping her secret garden, loving the long continuous</l>
               <l>dialog, absorbing, obsessing, warm and sweet as ex-</l>
               <l>crement newly made, unspeakable, but hers, and real.</l>
            </lg>
            <lg>
               <head>ADDIE, ALICE</head>
               <l>Aunt Addie went to the hospital for a three day checkup</l>
               <l>came out with a clean billof health rejoiced at eighty-three</l>
               <l>ay-yah she savs Maine voice unaided eyes <caesura/> family proud <caesura/>race proud</l>
               <l>discipline proud <caesura/>straight square proud <caesura/>spareness dryness proud</l>
               <l>awkward proud <caesura/>truth proud. <caesura/>Addie; <caesura/>You start out with nothing</l>
               <l>you end up with nothing. <caesura/>My traveling days are over. <caesura/>I</l>
               <l>remember Souza's band and Burton Holmes' lectures. <caesura/>In fact I</l>
               <l>heard Winston Churchill telling his experiences in the Boer War</l>
               <l>the winter of nineteen <caesura/>hundred and one. <caesura/>Making blouses for</l>
               <l>April <caesura/>pajamas for Ramona <caesura/>distant granddaughters <caesura/>putting up</l>
               <l>pears for the winter of nineteen hundred and seventy-two. <caesura/>Aunt</l>
               <l>Addie s house is bare of suffering as her face <caesura/> in which suffering</l>
               <l>would be an indulgence eves no feling showing <caesura/>asking Maine</l>
               <l>voice slightly rasped edges <caesura/>knowing but not dwelling <caesura/>what did</l>
               <l>you expect?</l>
               <l>In Istanbul a woman of one hundred and one is lifted out of bed</l>
               <l>into bed <caesura/>mind clear in a crooked cage <caesura/>telling how the sultan</l>
               <l>was deposed and another came in the palace.</l>
               <l>Mary had a sister Alice <caesura/>pleasingly plump <caesura/>white calves</l>
               <l>hairless armpits <caesura/>clear brow <caesura/>still eyes. Alice lost an eye</l>
               <l>when wood was thrown from the woodpile. <caesura/>Blood ran down her</l>
               <l>dress. Alice lost a son flu caried him off. <caesura/>Alice lost</l>
               <l>a daughter who married a Jewish artist. <caesura/>Alice lost a husband</l>
               <l>when she grew fat and mad. <caesura/>Twenty years after <caesura/>one-eyed</l>
               <l>burnt-out schizophrenic <caesura/>Alice sees three figures swarm through</l>
               <l>glass doors <caesura/>daughter <caesura/>husband <caesura/>her husband? <caesura/>son <caesura/>her son? <caesura/>to</l>
               <l>take her outside. <caesura/>She smiles <caesura/>says well declare <caesura/>gets up</l>
               <l>goes to the door <caesura/>where coat hat bag <caesura/>are hanging <caesura/>and turns</l>
               <l>ready.</l>
            </lg>
         </div>
      </body>
              <back><p> May Stevens is a New York painter.</p></back>

</text>
</TEI>

Subscribe to journal