Reimagining My Body

I stood there, shoulders slouched, elbows locked, hands glued to the side of the toilet. My body convulsing, I told myself, “this is the last time, just one more time and you’ll get back on track tomorrow.” It wasn’t the last time. I had been forcing myself to purge for months at this point, and each time I hated myself for it. It was something I couldn’t control. It wasn’t out of a need for attention as so commonly thought, but a pure need to be the unreachable level of thin that I thought would make me beautiful. I was thirty pounds underweight and I still hated my body. There is no “good enough” when suffering with this type of illness–every pound you lose just encourages you to continue purging until you are reduced to bone and skin. [excerpt

Escaped from the Language-Lab

There once was a poor woodchopper. This woodchopping, he said one day to his woman, there sits no dry bread in it [it does not pay]. I work myself an accident [extremely hard] the whole day, but you and our twelve children have not to eat

Letter Written by Victor A. Speert to Edith Speert Dated June 8, 1945

[Translation begins] 8 June 1945 Gr. Berkel- Near Hameln My darling sweetheart, Well, we’re not receiving any mail until we reach Mannheim but that does not stop me from writing. If I can arrange it, I’m going to try and mail my letters at an APO that is still set up here. Today I really knocked myself out doing a lot of swimming etc. all at one time. In the morning I went swimming in an indoor pool in Hameln and in the afternoon I went swimming in a beautiful outdoor pool at Bad Pyrmont. This Bad Pyrmont was and for that matter still is a beautiful resort town tucked away in the hills. Most of the buildings are hotels and contain thousands of Germans who are convalescing. It seems that one adopts a different attitude to the enemy now that they are in hospitals etc. Gee, honey, I’m developing a real sun tan. If I continue at this rate I should be a colored fellow. You know, it’s really difficult to write when you are not receiving any letters and nothing is happening around you. C’est la guerre. Rumors are still flying around here as to what’s going to happen to us but no one knows positively. I love you, darling. Vic [Translation ends

04. Mongo Give Good E-Mail

The first time I met Richard C. Richards (whom I later learned was also known as Mongo) we were at the 2013 LPS conference on the west coast of Florida. He was wearing a T-shirt that said something about having attended his own funeral, so I figured that he, like me, had a penchant for gallows humor. Later, during an author-meets-critics session focusing on his at-the-time-new book (A Philosopher Looks at The Sense of Humor), I was as eager to learn more about his work as I was delighted by the friendly banter between him and the other attendees. Although this was the first time I had been to this conference or met members of the society, it was immediately clear that this was a man who was both loved and respected. So, because I was determined to get a piece of him myself, I bought his book, read it, then reached out to him via email. Thus began one of my most cherished online relationships. Actually, that’s an easy hurdle to clear as I don’t, as a rule, have online relationships and consider the term itself a bit oxymoronic. No, we didn’t become “FaceSpace” friends or start “sexting” one another—in fact, I suspect that he would be as uninterested as I am in such 21st century distractions. Of course, I can only speak for myself, but I hope it will suffice to say that I avoid social media as much as I do angry fire ants or artisanal pizza, and not necessarily in that order. [excerpt

Honest Brokers of Information

This may make me biased. If so, so be it. For that I have no apologies. But to friend, foe, and those in between, I can and do say that my life since then has been dedicated to trying to make of myself a journalist of integrity--one who believes in Independent journalism, with a capital I, the kind of journalism that plays no favorites, pulls no punches-whether covering crime, conventions, or combat

Freya Stark

Freya Madeline Stark lived for a century, and into that one hundred years she packed a life of extraordinary daring and ingenuity. Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself, she wrote in Baghdad Sketches ( enlarged edition, 193 7); I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates. Such a motto defines not only her approach to the world but also the character of the woman herself. She had no duplicate. The writings that resulted from her constant travels began as wonder-filled accounts of ancient storybook kingdoms of the Middle East and moved impressively toward a reflective consideration of the differences between a nomadic way of life and the stable urbanity that might have been her lot if she had decided to fit the mold of those around her. In these accounts of her own transformation she brought a growing body of readers not only into exotic locales but also to the brink of metaphysical questions about the meaning of life

Flashdance

With each day of isolation, I delve further into myself, along with a mild dissociation from reality and self as formed in relation to others and gaze. The majority of this time is spent without seeing a full body; when a body is alone, there is no one to see it in its entirety. I can’t be sure what my body looks like, so I must choose a body because passivity leads to invisibility. I have been looking for a body that encapsulates a multiplicity of self and dynamic spirit, the kind I could fall in love with. When two bodies touch, they so often hurt each other. I want to explore the experience of touching myself or touching by myself, emboldening a self-sustaining self. I reject the form I was given because it cannot look how I feel. There’s a disconnect in the mirror and voyeur from what is reflected back to me. I can’t love a self who is not honest and my human form has dishonest obligations to rules and order. My insides are highly irregular. Be it my heart, brain, or bowels, it often feels there is no rhyme, reason or reality to my internal landscape. In order to understand it, I must externalize it onto a body that is new and defies all the forces that makes me desirable or undesirable in the outside world, the false truth of self-worth. But there is no need to limit myself to one body… I encountered a slug in the fall and it made my eyes sting with tears. Its sumptuous, glossy body clung relentlessly to a blade of grass, moving like molasses, inspiring a feeling of tenacity and self-assurance that made me happy and sad all at once. I don’t understand why people are afraid of bugs or find them gross. I often feel gross, lazy and sluggish. I loathe myself for it and tie my alienation from old friends and lovers either fundamentally or inadvertently to their repulsion towards me; towards what’s dysfunctionally trapped inside, ambivalently sabotaging the outer shell. I want to be healthy in every capacity, but I challenge myself to retain autonomy in solitude, cautious not to squash sluggish characteristics just to be desired by an outside body. When I’m alone, I’m alone, and I can stew in my juices and endlessly orgasm. And I would rather sacrifice touch than myself. In my fantasy I create fantastical science and in my fantasy slugs have sex with themselves and I am a slug

Don\u27t Let It Sink

I trip, I fall, and then I pick myself back up again. This has become a daily routine for someone like me. There are days when the easiest thing to do is give up--plain and simple. But, as I tease with the idea, something always turns me, aligns me, back on track. No one said a journey was easy. No one said an ocean calm. After all, a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor

History in images / history in words : reflections on the possibility of really putting history on film (or what a historian begins to think about when people start turning his books into movies)

This was supposed to be easy. A chance to bring together all my thoughts on film and history. To make my inchoate notions coherent. To force myself to see what it is I have been thinking. But it has not been easy--more like attempting to pick up water and hold it in your hand. The ideas will not cohere. They change between the thinking and the writing of them. They slip away. They refuse to blend into a whole. Is it me? Is it the subject? I won't even bother with that one. The point is to say only what I can. Which means refusing to make artificial sense of ideas that will not make sense. Which means refusing to bridge the gaps in my knowledge. Which means refusing to make connections where connections do not yet (in my mind) exist. Which means abandoning the idea of an essay and doing no more than sharing some of my reflections and the ideas I have wrestled with during the months I have been attempting to write this piece. Which means there will be no linear development, no attempt at closure, no final answers to the questions posed by the elusive problem of can we represent history on film