POP FEMINIST PERBLOG

“It’s definitely not a Nashville party” is (among other things, like “the best line of the century”) a really meaningful “home sweet home” analog to me. This is why I am for sure going to take up cross stitch.

Frauenkirche, Dresden

Crossing the Elbe into the Altstadt, on the bridge, there were people in “Native American” headdresses playing flutes and selling CDs. On the North side of the city, we hung out with a bunch of punks setting up a show in the middle of a street until the cops busted everyone up. I was wary about white punks are in Eastern Germany, so I made sure to keep an eye on everyone’s shoelaces. It was the only place I remember seeing mostly Converse high tops. I had neon Pumas that people only liked in Dover and London. I somehow don’t remember my hostel, but I remember walking back at night and meeting a hedgehog on the sidewalk. A hedgehog! Walking next to me! I remembered stories of A’s German friends visiting the U.S. and freaking out about raccoons. I don’t recall what I ate in Dresden, but I do recall being so overwhelmed at the bricks and the baroque and the rebuilding that we had to hop into the mountains for a few days to unwind. It’s a lot. A lot. Saxony is beautiful, though. Nothing like it on this continent. I was so thrilled by the greenery.

(Source: evelevich, via certifiedshawty)

galesofnovember:

hugginangryfeminist:

unrealisticfangirlfantasy:

#THIS IS HOW WE SHOW EACH OTHER WHERE WE LIVE IN MICHIGAN #you just point to your hand i’m not kidding

that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

officially moving to michigan.

:) we michiganders love our mittens. 

I’m not sure if tumblr can really prepare you for the reality of this.  Don’t think it’s just some oddball thing that comes up every now and again. Everyone in Michigan does this, and they do it constantly.   If you can get through a week of talking to Michiganders without at least one person doing this,  I would be surprised.

I do it constantly. I cannot talk about my position in the world in any manner without mapping it onto my body, and I think this habit actually has influenced the way I think about bodies in relation to space. I also use my hand to show/think about geography in Flint (if you close your thumb, it’s more or less the same rectangle).

I can map the dirt roads on the tips of the U.P.’s fingers. I can show you at least ten notable ghost towns on my palm. I can trace the migration of the major strains of Mexican-American and Guatamalan-American migrant workers into the hand. I can show you how far up your fingers the Great Chicago fire spread. I could probably color the whole thing in to show population density by memory. I can outline the regions that have Halo Burgers and the regions that have Nationals. I can tell you where in your palm it starts to get seedy fulla white supremacist militiamen. I can pinpoint the three or four most terrifying spots in Michigan that I’ve ever been. Between the left index and middle finger was the spot that I felt the most isolated I’ve ever felt and I grew up in Nevada. I can name so many of the islands that your hand can’t show. (Did you know one of them is called Squaw? Yeah.) I can tell you which interstates specifically were designed to erase which neighborhoods of black people (at least in Lansing and Flint). I can show you where the first Catholic, Anabaptist, and Lutheran churches in Michigan were. I can tell you about the Finns or the Lithuanians or the Croatians or especially the Franconians. I could stand to know a little more about the Dutch. I feel weird that Muskegon is shown here but Saginaw and Jackson aren’t.

(via desliz)

I am not a linguist, and I’m not particularly interested in talking like one.  I am in this identity and culture class, and I know that Estrella is going to ask us to talk about our, as she says, linguistic autobiographies.  I am reading this David Crystal chapter about dialects not accents and I am thinking, She is going to ask us to talk about our dialects.

I’ve got quite a few non-Anglo immigrant roots, but most of them were speed assimilationists.  If my grandpa’s genealogical newsletters are to believed, my grandma Fran’s thirteen-some-siblings learned English the second they washed onto the shore, and also None of That Had Anything To Do With Stalin Killing The Jews Or Anything Don’t Worry Kids.  The linguistics are not a part of the story.  They are American, at least since 1920 or so.  I mean, all my life they told me they were Russian—you know, they came over from the U-S-S-R!  But you know what happened, last year?  I found out the name of the town they came from.  And it’s in Ukraine.  Ukraine-S-S-R.  I don’t even know what language they spoke, much less how it impacted their identity as immigrants.  I am subtly led to believe that because they have money now, they were never immigrants.  They speak English.  They belong.

But I don’t really care about my dad’s side of the family anyway.  As far as I’m concerned, the greatest cultural-linguistic contribution I’ve received from my paternal half is that placeless flat dialect I earned by learning to read in Las Vegas, a first-grader sprawled out on transplanted grass with Goosebumps books, shaded from the desert sun by synthetic peach stucco and those weird glowing green street signs they have out West.  Here is what I will bring to class:  What does it say about my lingusitic identity that I did my most formative speaking-learning in the most vacantly cosmopolitan valley?  A town so ahistorical, unremembering, displaced; like a million midwestern orphan newsgirls with Big Dreams were dropped into the valley’s dry, neon lap and preserved for eternity in a state of absolutely generic despair.  A town of people who are never willing to admit where they’re from, unless they’re brown and no one will listen anyway.  A million vernaculars/one dialect.  Cocktail waitress.

There are markers of place that tie me to maternal memory more tightly.  My mother’s mother died when my mom was six but my Aunt still says “root” and “ruined” like it’s an Alabama cousin vacation before 1967 rolled in.  She never lost it.  My mother only vaguely remembers Southern Sundays with her mom—just itchy tights and mary-janes, getting slapped on the hand for being Too Bored For Baptists.  She remembers the way her mom spoke, though, and remembers visiting Alabama relatives and realizing why her mom always sounded so different from her friends’ mommas.

My mother spent most of her life trying to scrub off those linguistic markers.  By the time she was a teenager, both her parents were dead and all she knew about the way she spoke was that it sounded like barefoot concrete seven kids alcoholic dad absolute poverty in Pontiac, Michigan and god knows she was going to be better than that.  My mother’s education was minimal, but it was important to her that no one ever knew where she came from, that no one looked at her after she spoke the way they looked at her feet when she was a little girl and said to her Oh, you’re one of those kids.  My mom had a Class Complex.  I’m sure it only got worse for those twelve-or-so-years she was married to my dad.  His parents had state jobs and White Diamonds and real Persian rugs and had traveled all over.  My dad had completed one whole semester at University of Michigan.  My dad had parents and adequate shoes.

My sister describes those six years before I was born, the bulk of my parents’ marriage, as a period of constant reassertion that this family was not going to be ghetto this family does not say ain’t this family will not let white trash ruin their happy happy but poor happy family life on Home Street.  And she will, god help her!, defend that right with her fists.  And she did.  I remember bits and pieces of this.  I remember education is the most important thing for you because you are are a Powerful Girl and also you won’t be poor forever and you know better than to talk like that you sound stupid and no you can’t wear baggy jackets, just because we live in Pontiac right now doesn’t mean we are ghetto.  But by the time I was in high school, we had moved to the suburbs.  We were poorer than we had ever been, but we had arrived.  I went to a really good school.  I remember asking my mother, who still worked in downtown Pontiac during the day, why she “talked different” with her city friends than she did at home.  She said, there’s nothing wrong with where I came from, and I don’t want people to think that I’m uppity.  She knew she had “saved” me from her own life, at least a little bit, and she was proud of how well I wrote and how well I talked.  She could finally remind herself where she came from.  My mother lost that “root” and “ruined” when she washed her “ain’ts” off, but she’s not afraid to sound like she’s from the city anymore.  She is.  I often wonder if she’s mourned her linguistic roots, though.  When she rinsed off her father and her dead mother, she also watched her living mother and her lost siblings and her first home wash down the drain with them.  It’s important to her, today, to constantly remember her mother.  It’s a process of spiritual grounding, and maybe a form of repentance for selling out what little her mother worked to give her.  I will never sell out my mother, even if I talk like I went to college.  I don’t ever want to forget to think about my mother and her mother and my aunts, even if my mother’s shame disconnected me from the way they all speak.  I don’t speak anything like any of them.

lookuplookup:

nebraska-admiral:

Songs that will always make one feel better: “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen

ohhh come take my hand, we’re riding out tonight to case the promised land

So, when I went to see The Promise last week, one of the things I really loved was hearing Bruce talking about the difference between Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town. He described Born to Run as an album about wanting to escape where you’re from, wanting to get away from the places and people who have defined your life up to that point & build a new life for yourself on your own terms, whereas Darkness on the Edge of Town was an album about honoring where you’re from, about acknowledging how the people you grew up with and the place you grow up in leave a powerful mark on you, help you develop your sense of self, your moral code…

& I guess I feel all of that really, really deeply. I know that home is railroad bridges and train tracks and the rush of the Cuyahoga and Chagrin rivers and packing boxes to make a living and bars that open at 4am and abandoned buildings for the Slovenian Daily News and I feel like such a sap for even saying any of this, but sometimes all I can think about is how hard everyone I know has to work just to get by and how when I went away to school I felt like my socioeconomic status was visibly inscribed by me, especially on the first day of class when professors would make you say your name and where you’re from.

Girl, you almost made me cry ‘cause I’m from Flint Michigan so this is MY LANGUAGE.  And this is also, really, why I grew into loving Darkness best.

Or maybe acutely Midwestern in a Southern tradition.  I can’t decide.