The Far End of the Doppler Effect

The sky is as blue as blue is today. And I have so many thoughts that keep being narrowed to sharper points by odd confluences--I love when there is a topic simmering in the back of the mind and something you read just illuminates it that much further…

To be less vague, a series of incidences involving gender have occurred. A joint art project I seem to be embarking on with MotN on the nature of gender ambiguity, a random blogger assuming I am a man, a review (by Dave Itzkoff) in this weekend's NYT Book Review I just picked up on Alice Sheldon, aka James Tiptree Jr., science fiction writer. Everyone assumed Tiptree was a man, although there were certainly questions being asked as to her gender.

From the review: “…Sheldon would join the CIA as a counterintelligence analyst, earn her Ph.D. in experimental psychology and operate a chicken farm in New Jersey--they were restless and uncertain times for her. She began work on a major treatise on aesthetics, then abandoned it. Her marriage, though harmonious, had turned sexless, and she frequently found herself consumed by intense crushes on women that she could never bring herself to act on.”

Whatever. I liked the first part of that paragraph very much though: a chicken farm? Nice.

Reading the many guises Sheldon embraced felt enlivening. (Minus the Benzadrine she preferred. More deadening, really.) Between the sky and the endless possibilities of living, I am bursting out my body right now. Sfortunamente, I must get this bursting self to the office. There, I will devote myself to the daily task of attuning my head to the news. I'll consider it my own personal chicken farm. Buon giorno, tutti.