heaving bosoms

I grew up reading, mostly trashy books of the paperback genre, but I've come across a few gems. And by "gems" I mean soaring pieces of literature that establish extensive landscapes of thought, feeling and possibility in my petty little heart. The kind of stories that you either gulp down in one go because they're so stunning and irresistible, or the kind of stories that take you forever to read because the process is meant to be excruciating and ponderous, monumental and pompous. (I like pompous stories.) I like books that shape the way I think of and see things. The kind of stories that make me want to write and imagine, the kind of stories that make me want to sit down and think, assess and change.

For some reason, my perception of my relationship with my mother is very much coloured by D. Marlatt's Ana Historic. Now, that's not a very flattering lens with which to perceive things -- historical distortions wrought by vicious patriarchy, the re-imagination of language (armed to the teeth) and literature, dualistic definitions held up to an almost violent scrutiny. Throughout the course of the novel, the character that I found most disturbing was Ina, the unfathomable, manic-depressive/subtly deranged mother. I didn't see my own mother in her precisely, but I heartily recognized Annie's emotional processes as a richer (far, far) more eloquent reflection of my own.

I don't even know what I'm talking about. Everything's all a-fuzz. This is my stream of consciousness: fuzz. It's not even a stream, more like puffs of crinkly thought meekly popped out.

Sometimes, I really do wish I was born male.