"A new straight-studies course treats male-female partnerships as the real deviance."

Subheadline for a New York Magazine article titled, "If Hetero Relationships Are So Bad, Why Do Women Go Back for More?" The teaser title on the front page is "Do Straight Women Really Exist?" The author of the article is Jessica Bennett.

“In this class, we’re going to flip the script,” [said sociologist Jane Ward to her students on the first day of class]. “It’s going to be a place where we worry about straight people. Where we feel sympathy for straight people. We are going to be allies to straight people.”...

Flipping the script is a good approach to studying the topic, and the topic is worthy of study. However, I don't like being directed to "worry" or "feel sympathy" or "be allies." I'd look at the subject head on. But neutrality is cruel, and women want to present as empathetic. 

The online world seems to get weirder and more retrograde about heterosexuality every day. Idealized masculinity has become more aggressive, more jacked up, and also more high maintenance... while femininity gets ever “softer,” more nurturing and domestic, and somehow still more sexy....

Things that "can only be hinted at" in a short review of the new biography of the poet Adrienne Rich.

"How Louise Glück, the new Nobel laureate, was no admirer of Rich’s teaching practices at Columbia University when Glück was a student there. (Rich’s remarks on her students’ poems were often limited to a comment like, 'I don’t dig it.') How Anthony Burgess sublet Rich’s New York apartment, tore it up, then wrote a novel that satirized its feminist contents." 

That's Dwight Garner, writing in the NYT, who begins by telling us "Long before I read her, I disliked Adrienne Rich" — "She was a radical lesbian separatist who didn’t want men at her readings and would not respond to their questions... a humorless scold... perceived to have bent her sensitive talent on a political wheel." Garner also complains the the biography "makes it difficult for anyone to criticize Rich’s work, for any reason whatsoever, and not be thought complicit in the grinding machinery of misogyny."

I just want to know what Anthony Burgess did, what the "feminist contents" were, and how he satirized them. Here's the biography. From page 246: "[Burgess] cut a tornado's path of destruction through her home.... a mattress missing; a box spring ripped; bedroom tables dotted with cigarette burns; kitchen utensils missing, burned, or broken; a lamp broken; and a sofa and rug stained with spilled food." Rich sought reimbursement, and Burgess said his $475 security deposit ought to cover the "petty" damage, especially since he'd gotten the apartment wired for cable TV. 

The "misogynistic novel" was "The Clockwork Testament, or Enderby's End" (1974). Enderby ≈ Burgess. He's staying in the apartment of "a humorless, man-hating novelist" — ≈ Rich — "whose bookshelves bulge with treatises on race, gender, and revolution that Enderby views with distaste." The quotes are from the new bio, and they don't convey any spirit of satire. And unfortunately, you can't get "The Clockwork Testament" in a Kindle version, so I've reached a dead end.

"I didn’t see my family again until 1978. By then, my father had died, we had two children of our own, and I was active in the women’s movement..."

"... and had become an English professor at Douglass, the women’s college of Rutgers University. Being disowned had given me the freedom to invent my life on my own terms: as an atheist, feminist, professor, and liberal. I initiated the reunion, but not because I missed my family or needed Jewish traditions to organize my life. It was because Adrienne Rich, my colleague at Douglass, had insisted to me that no woman could be an honest feminist who had not made peace with her own mother and sister. The family I rejoined was not the family I left. No one in my generation, none of my cousins, my uncles or my aunts, was untouched by those turbulent years of American history. Fifteen years is a long time, and while some of the emotional threads that were broken were mended over the years since, most were not. But that is another story. Still, I sometimes wonder if I should write a sequel called Chava Returns...."

From "'Fiddler,' Tevye’s Daughters, and Me" by Elaine Showalter (The NY Review of Books). In "Fiddler on the Roof," Chava is the daughter who finds love outside of the Jewish faith, and her father tells her to leave and never return. He declares "Chava is dead to us! We will forget her."

In the last scene, the Jews of Anatevka have been cast out by the edict of the tsar, and Tevye is forced to leave with his neighbors and take his family to seek familiar faces in the strange new land of America. But when Chava and Fyedka come to say farewell, he will still not speak to them, although he mutters “God be with you” under his breath....

For me, the story is personal. In June 1963, when I married a nominally Episcopalian professor of French, my parents disowned me, and so did my grandparents, all but two of my twenty-plus aunts and uncles, and all but three of my dozens of cousins. No one from my family came to our wedding, and I did not see them again for fifteen years....

You hear a lot about family love, not so much about familial estrangement.

Goodbye to Adrienne Rich and Earl Scruggs.

She was 82. He was 88. Famous people die in 3s — it has been noted — but who could complete the triad that begins with Rich and Scruggs?

He was the ultimate banjo player...

... best known for performing alongside the guitar-playing Lester Flatt with the Foggy Mountain Boys. Among their signature songs were “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” which was used as the getaway music in the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde,” and “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” the theme song of the 1960s television sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

For TV and movie watchers of the 60s, this was the sound of freedom — Jed moves away from there, there being wherever it was that the poor mountaineer "lived," and Bonnie, she follows Clyde, who said to her:

You're different.... You know, you're like me. You want different things. You got somethin' better than bein' a waitress. You and me travelin' together, we could cut a path clean across this state and Kansas and Missouri and Oklahoma and everybody'd know about it. You listen to me, Miss Bonnie Parker. You listen to me.

And later, she says: "You know what, when we started out, I thought we was really goin' somewhere. This is it. We're just goin', huh?"

That's what poured into our ears back in the 60s, lubricated by banjo music. Adrienne Rich got her cultural foothold in the 60s:

Once mastered, poetry’s formalist rigors gave Ms. Rich something to rebel against, and by her third collection, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” published by Harper & Row, she had pretty well exploded them. That volume appeared in 1963, a watershed moment in women’s letters: “The Feminine Mystique” was also published that year.

In the collection’s title poem, Ms. Rich chronicles the pulverizing onus of traditional married life.....

I'm going to pulverize your onus, baby. The funny thing though: Rich was a lesbian. And yet she married a man:

In 1953 Ms. Rich had married a Harvard economist, Alfred Haskell Conrad, and by the time she was 30 she was the mother of three small boys....

By 1970, partly because she had begun, inwardly, to acknowledge her erotic love of women, Ms. Rich and her husband had grown estranged. That autumn, he died of a gunshot wound to the head; the death was ruled a suicide. To the end of her life, Ms. Rich rarely spoke of it.

I think I once bought one of her books. It seemed like something in the spirit of the times that one should partake of, but I never read it. I find most poetry annoying, and hers was no exception. I did read that essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," which all the radical feminists were taking terribly seriously circa 1990. It was the assigned text in one of the law school radical feminist reading groups I participated back in those days. There were all these earnest, intelligent, heterosexual women who studied that text and gabbed about it until they genuinely got their minds around the amazing realization that they should not be heterosexual. Not that they should be having sex with women, but in some other, conceptual way. I'd tell you what the concept was but my mind is not longer around that particular realization, and I don't have the time right now to redo all that hard intellectual work that I did amongst the feminists in 1990/1991.

I'm sure it was all about freedom, but I'm free of that now. Since I'm quoting Bob Dylan today:

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now