Category: blog

Dolly Parton

I am not a country music fan in particular, although I’ve always like a few crossover songs/artists like Bonnie Raitt and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” from the Charlie Daniels Band (although I prefer the devil’s music, quelle surprise).

And I’ve got a fondness for Dolly Parton: not so much for the music as the woman herself, who strikes me as both accessible and very classy.

For me, classy isn’t about “sophistication,” it’s about grace. The grace to be comfortable and help others be comfortable in whatever circumstances one finds oneself. Help is a key word — people with class step up and do something when something must be done. And they make other people feel not just “better” (as in, well, okay, I don’t feel embarrassed anymore), but actively good. Classy people never laugh at you — they laugh with you, or at themselves, or at the wackiness of the world. They reframe their little corner of the world so that we all fit into it.

Here’s Dolly being classy.

And now I must go be busy. Enjoy your day.

Busy with a smile

This is a sketch by Pascal Campion. I think it’s great, and more to the point, right now I think it’s me — running running running with a smile.

Sketch by Pascal Campion

In the last week, I suddenly find myself in a busy place. Getting things done. Having fun. But right now I need to be three of me. I need more brains, more arms, more time and less need for sleep. I am so behind on responding to comments here that I am sure many of you think I am just a figment of your imagination. I hope you will bear with me — I do want to talk to you, I do, I do. And if we’re talking about talking, I owe so many people email that I’m worried there aren’t enough pixels in the universe. If you are one of those people, I grovel through the internet and beg your continued patience.

This is what happens when I become very focused (as I am right now on putting the final touches on my business website). Focus is a sly little word: it sounds so serene, when really it just means that I fall down a rabbit hole, blink at the end of the day when Nicola forcibly removes me from my keyboard, and realize that while I was away my To Do List mysteriously got longer. How fucking serene is that?

Ah well. I’m working my way through the list, and I will catch up on the comments and the email and All Will Be Well. But right now, I think I’ll just go have a beer. And smile.

(Thanks, Pascal, for permission to use your sketch here. Hey everyone, go check out Pascal’s site.)

Law and story

Kelley,

Just wanted to let you know your posts on jury duty have hit the Washington Association Of Criminal Defense Attorneys listserve. You hit the nail on the head and accurately read the undercurrents. Having been a prosecuting attorney in King and Skagit County and a criminal defense attorney for the last long ten years, I am always glad to see how others, outside the system, see the players. I say players because in many ways trials are like plays. Reasonable doubt, preponderance of the evidence, clear and convincing evidence…..forget it! It all comes down to a good story, well told.

Oh, one of the defense attorneys recognized the case, admitted his involvement (stiffness and inexperience) and told us the rest of the story. Both defendants were found not guilty.

I personally would rather look foolish and win than poised and professional and lose. Please do not post or use my name but feel free to comment to your hearts content.

It’s fascinating to hear from you. I’ve always believed that the best attorneys are storytellers under the suits, but have never had someone from your side of the table talk about it.

I go on at (perhaps tedious) length about story in this blog because I’m a writer, but also because story is at the root of so much in the world: self-identity, our presentation in the world, the way we accuse others and defend ourselves (in court or in our living rooms), the way we organize our responses to things. I think people, consciously or unconsciously, look for stories to understand the world. If we’re hard-headed intellectuals, we talk about “making sense” or “clear thinking” — but really it’s all about a story that feels true to us.

It must sometimes be enormously frustrating to do your job. Because some things that are true do not make good stories. They don’t “make sense.” And how can you make the necessary human connection, tell a human story that a human jury can understand and respond to, if the truth doesn’t make a good story? That must be beyond frustrating, it must be frightening as well, given the potential outcome for the people at the table.

I am about to start making up theories about your work, and they may be totally wrong. No offense intended, and please feel free to point out my errors and educate me out of my ignorance if you’re so inclined. But now I’m imagining that it’s at those times — when the truth isn’t sexy, when it’s a story that doesn’t make sense or that people refuse to believe (an even greater obstacle sometimes) — that lawyers need to stop being professional and poised, and start being human. Maybe foolish, maybe awkward, maybe emotional, but necessarily real. To make the story more human because a human is telling it.

My best work comes from throwing myself out there, making story and writing choices that could easily make me look foolish (and sometimes do). It’s not that I win in spite of those risks — those risks are where the win comes from. Without being willing to look foolish, I can’t create that human connection: here I am, let me tell you a story. Does it sometimes work like that for you?

I know how many new writers come to the art thinking that the most important things are cool ideas and important themes and elegant phrases. I wonder how many lawyers come to their art thinking that the most important things are knowledge of the law and a certain scrappy attitude. When in the end, in both our worlds, expertise (although essential) is only part of the equation.

I’d be very interested in anything you have to say, if you’d like to continue the conversation.

All of us out there together

You may have heard of Jill Bolte Taylor. She’s a neuroanatomist who had a stroke at the age of 37. Her deep understanding of what was happening to her own brain made the experience transformative for her. She recovered, she wrote a book, it did well. I’d heard about it, but had never seen her speak until a friend sent me the link to this astonishing video (thank you, Tommaso, it’s just amazing).

Taylor made think, and cry, and feel immense wonder and joy at the possibilities within us. Maybe she’ll do that for you too.

(The talk runs about 20 minutes. Here’s a direct link in case you need it.)

How do I talk about how this makes me feel, this simple and powerful idea — just step into my right brain, anytime I choose, as easy as taking my next breath. Reach from the solitude of self into some infinite space where being human means being part of something bigger than ourselves. Except that the thing that is bigger than us is within us. That’s what it is to be human, to be larger inside than outside. To find that I am — that we all are, every single one of us — wide and deep, that we carry within us giant waves and great canyons and vast ecstatic silence, everything, everything.

Is she right? Can we really have that anytime we want?

Well, I just did. Just then. I had to come back into my left brain to talk about it, because that’s how it works, but as near as I can tell, I took a breath and I thought about stepping away and stepping into; and I looked out the window at the gray sky heavy with rain that will be thin and chilly when it comes: autumn has arrived between one day and the next, the morning darker, the trees a different green, the sun turning away. Beautiful. A time of wind and shadows and possibility. All over the world, people lived that instant of their lives and I felt as if we all took our next breath together….

The right brain is not an unfamiliar or frightening place for me. I’m an artist; I live in the midst of ongoing conversation between my two brains, because it is my work to organize my emotional response to the world so I can share it with other people. The right brain channeled through the left. There’s no writing, no music, no painting or dance or drama without them both. There is no story, at least not the kind that has any meaning for me — story in which the discipline of form and the framework of structure draw me into an experience that is immediate and emotional. The left brain opening the door so that the right brain can charge through and grab on tight; and then the story dances me from one space to the other, back and forth, back and forth… It takes my breath away.

It’s astonishing to be human. I love it. It’s easy, it’s hard, it hurts, it’s ecstasy. I find more and more that what I want is not to be balanced, but to be able to find my balance again and again. To find the balance between risk and growth and stupid choices and smart ones; to move between hope and its opposite, which for me these days is not despair but an increasingly clear sense that it doesn’t matter whether things work out the way I want: what matters is that I am being human. And maybe that’s enough: with all this enormous landscape inside me, maybe it is enough to explore it until the end of my days, without so much worry about whether it’s going exactly to plan. To find the balance between the present and the past and the future: between the right brain and the left. Between all of my selves. Between me and you.

Today is my birthday. It’s a good day to think about these things, a lovely present to laugh and cry and look at the sky and feel, for just an instant, all of us out there together.

Bartlet Vinick ’08

I just deleted a long and bitter rant about politics. I am not going there, and I hope if you choose to comment, that you won’t either. As I said to my mum today (waves at mum through the internet), I know how I’m voting. I don’t need to preach and I sure don’t need to be converted.

But you know… sometimes I need to wish that things could be different. And right now I wish real government was more like TV. I wish that Jed Bartlet could be the president.

It feels a little disrespectful to talk about TV characters being president when so much hangs in the balance of this election. I don’t mean any disrespect. But real politics, like everything else about reality, is often messy, often murky, and often mundane (which is where some of the real horror happens… well, ma’am, I’m just doing my job.) TV is story, and story is constructed to make mess only so that clarity can come from it, so that we may find a meaning to take away. Right now, I wish for some better meaning to all the meanness and the fear and the helpless rage I see around me…

… but we’re not going there today. Instead, we are going to The West Wing.

I loved this show. Beautifully written, passionate particular characters, issues that I cared about, resolutions that I wasn’t always comfortable with. A cold clear look at the realities of power and what kinds of people are best suited to exercise it. Incredible seasonal arcs of story that mingled the personal and political. When I watch story, when I read, when I listen, I like to laugh and cry and hold my breath waiting to see what will happen… The West Wing did that for me, and I miss it.

But now there is the InterMagicalNet, and today I have two clips for you. The first is from the pilot episode. We have spent an entire hour with the West Wing staff but haven’t met the president yet — and when we do, wow, what an entrance, and then it’s all about who’s got the power in the room. I was enraptured the first time I saw it, and still am, because that is what power can feel like sometimes. There a whole post in me about power someday, but for today this scene will stand just fine.

In the second clip, President Bartlet is making a midnight deal with Arnie Vinick, his Republican rival, and then there’s ice cream and conversation…

I know it’s simplistic. I know it’s a five-act structure timed to commercial breaks. I know it’s just a story. But it’s a good story, and good story makes us better. It makes us remember who we can be.

Friday pint

Every Friday I transfer posts here from the Virtual Pint archives.

A little of this, a little of that… a smorgasbord of pints.

Cheers!

Jury duty, part 2

Continued from yesterday.

The defense attorneys (there were two) and the district attorney took turns with the voir dire questions. It was interesting to see their different personalities emerge: the DA was friendly and accessible, one defense lawyer was smart and informal and just a little arrogant, and the other defense lawyer was a little stiff and pretty clearly the least experienced person among all the professional courtroom folks.

I mentioned that all the potential jurors had numbers, and that we sat in order, but I didn’t mention that the first 14 people sat in the jury box (12 jurors plus two alternates). They were the de facto jury until/unless someone challenged their qualifications. Anyone could be challenged for cause, meaning that the judge agreed they were unfit to serve — for example, two people in the box said they thought defendants were guilty until proven innocent, and got booted for cause. So the next two people in line moved into their places.

Each attorney also got a certain number of peremptory challenges, meaning they could just kick you out without explanation (i.e., because they didn’t think you’d vote their way). And that’s where the gaming really started, as each attorney tried to figure out how to use their challenges to get the jury that would be most sympathetic to their perspective.

The two defendants were charged with breaking and entering with intent to commit burglary, and also with malicious mischief. And in the last round of voir dire questions, along comes the DA with a hypothetical scenario about refusing to give your two kids a cookie, then coming into the kitchen to find the cookie jar broken and the kids eating cookies. You didn’t know which one had climbed on the counter and broken the jar. Do they both deserve to be punished? How do you handle the situation? She started going around the room and picking jurors at random, and asking them to answer.

I was gobsmacked at the utter brass of her spinning the case to us and asking for a verdict. I was even more gobsmacked when people started giving it to her. Some people would give the kids time out. Some would ask questions to find out more details of who had greater responsibility. Some people would punish them both equally, since they were both actually eating the cookies. Punish, punish, guilty, guilty, no more cookies ever! And so on.

And then she got to me. “Juror 35, what’s your response?”

I was not happy, and I am sure it showed. I said, “I don’t have a response to offer to your hypothetical situation.”

She looked interested. “Okay. Do hypotheticals annoy you?”

I said, “This one does.”

She looked even more interested (she was very good at this). “Okay, tell me more about that.”

I pointed at the defendants. “It’s not hypothetical. You’re asking me to start thinking about a case that I haven’t even been presented with yet. And I’m not willing to do that.”

She smiled. And then she changed the subject completely and didn’t ask anyone else that question. It was a moot point since I was number 35, and there was very little chance I would get into the jury box unless they found a way to get rid of the 19 people in front of me. But I’m guessing the DA might not have wanted me on her jury (grin).

When it was his turn, the smart defense attorney gave a speech about how this case wasn’t about a cookie jar. The DA just kept smiling. The defense lawyer asked more questions. And he discovered Juror 25. Juror 25 was an engineer: he was calm, analytical, and confident enough to know that he would make a good juror but that he needed to be on a panel with people who thought differently from him, so that he could have more than just his own perspective to consider. The defense lawyer fell stone in love with Juror 25. He actually said, “I love jurors like you,” which I think was perhaps the one dumb thing he did all day: the DA smiled even harder. And when it came time to start excusing jurors from the panel, she kicked off one obvious bleeding-heart liberal and then stuck. The two defense guys clubbed together and started using their peremptories, but they could only get to Juror 23 before they ran out of challenges. The one defense guy damn near cried: he wanted Juror 25 on the panel so bad he could taste it. And the DA just kept smiling and saying, “The state is happy with this panel, Your Honor,” while I watched in admiration and thought I bet you are!

And then the rest of us got to go home. (Actually, I went to Goodwill and bought some go-go clothes, although I should have waited an extra day, but more about that in a future post. And isn’t that another Evil TV trick, teasing like that?)

It was a fun day for me. And I’m still thinking about it off and on. Especially about all the shifting psychological dynamics I found in myself. I wanted them to like me. I wanted to speak my truth, even if that meant they didn’t like me. I watched other people give Too Much Information in some cases, revealing things they hadn’t been asked about, and I understood that because I felt the same compulsion when it was my turn. I watched other people actually auditioning to be on the jury, and I understood that too, although I didn’t do it myself. I wanted to be on the jury because I’m curious about the experience. I was worried that if I was on the jury, I would get so busy being the Writer Watching How Everything Worked that I might miss actual important points in the testimony, and then I felt badly for putting my own curiosity ahead of the reality of the situation for the two defendants. I didn’t like one of the defense lawyers. I did like the DA, even though she pissed me off with her hypothetical. I wondered if I would be able to separate the liking/not liking from the verdict. And so on. And it was also interesting knowing that it was business as usual for the lawyers and judge and courtroom staff, huge stress for the defendants, an inconvenience for some of the jury pool… so many different experiences happening simultaneously in a few hours in a small room.

Jury duty, part 1

I had jury duty two weeks ago. They didn’t want me on a jury — no surprise there. The surprise was how interesting the day was, when I had expected no more than bad chairs, bad coffee and bad traffic on the way home. I’ve been meaning to write about it, and then got hopelessly distracted by, well, everything. But our friend turned us on to the movie Runaway Jury which we watched last night (thanks, Liz!), and made me think more about my own experience.

King County has two superior court buildings, the ancient one in Seattle and the new one in Kent, where I was assigned. Nice! Upholstered chairs with arms, flat screen TVs, wifi, coffee and snack machines in the jury room with an espresso stand downstairs (hey, it’s Seattle… we went to get our WA license plate when we first moved back in 1995 and the sign outside was “License Tags and Espresso.” I do not make this up.)

We saw a video about the history of justice in Washington State and Why It Is Important To Not Weasel Out Of Jury Duty. We had an informative speech from a judge about what to expect from the day, along with a reiteration of the don’t-be-a-weasel speech. Then everyone went back to either doing their work (the wifi crowd) or reading their trashy novels (the rest of us). It made me feel great to see so many people reading.

But I didn’t get to read much. I was called into the first jury pool, and spent most of the morning and part of the afternoon in a group of 60 potential jurors undergoing voir dire. The point of voir dire is for everyone to find out enough about potential jurors to decide whether or not they want us on their trial. Generally the prosecution and the defense want different kinds of people, and their questions weren’t always subtle. The subtle part was that they were using the questions to start making their respective cases to us as a group even before the trial was officially underway.

Part of the point of voir dire is to get people to start talking about themselves. It’s fascinating to watch how it plays out. It becomes clear pretty quickly that some people are saying whatever they think will get them out of the building before lunch, in spite of the two weasel lectures plus a third one from the judge. I wanted to take the proto-weasels off into a corner and say you know, these attorneys’ bullshit detectors are pretty highly refined, you’re not fooling them, and the judge is so pissed off at you for trying to ditch your duty that she will keep you here all day if she can…. (And she did, too. I liked the judge, she was relaxed and decisive and tough and, I thought, very fair. And she ran a very smooth courtroom.)

The way it works is that the attorneys take turns asking general questions. We all have numbers, we’re sitting in numerical order, and if we answer “yes” to the question we are supposed to hold up our number so that everyone can write it down. Then the lawyers or the judge have the option of following up individually with any of us to get the details of our answers. The judge warned us that some of the questions might feel intrusive, and told us in the nicest possible way to get over it. Basically, they can ask you anything they want to in voir dire.

Some of the questions:

  • Have you or has anyone close to you been the victim of a crime?
    Pretty much everyone said yes.

  • Have you or has anyone close to you been accused of a crime?
    Many people said yes, including me since I have a relative who’s been in and out of the prison system for the last 25 years or so.

  • Have you ever been a witness to a crime?
    Yep, I caught someone stealing computers at Wizards of the Coast one lunchtime. That was an interesting 10 minutes…

  • Have you ever testified as a witness in a trial?
    Yep, see previous answer.

  • Do you know anyone associated with this case? (basically anyone physically in the courtroom at that moment, or anyone on the witness list, which they read to us).
    What was really interesting is that in a room of about 70 people, three people did have connections to someone associated with the case. It’s a smaller world than I realize sometimes.

  • Do you watch CSI or Law and Order on TV? If you were a juror on a case with no fancy forensic evidence, no DNA or anything like that, would that be a problem for you?
    At least half the crowd watches one of these shows, and at least two of those people said they would not be convinced in a case where there was no forensic evidence.

  • Do you think a defendant needs to demonstrate somehow that they are innocent?
    Really. Even after the judge’s very specific lecture about innocent until proven guilty and burden of proof on the prosecution, there were at least three or four people who responded with some version of well, they probably wouldn’t be having a trial if they didn’t do anything wrong….

And so forth. But the most interesting part for me was yet to come…

… and here I must do an Evil Television Trick and say To Be Continued... We have an appointment to go to, and then a friend is coming to dinner. And I am surprising Nicola with apple-blackberry crumble in spite of the sniveling remark (grin).

So I will finish the story tomorrow! (And here it is.)

Just say no to gender stability

Hi Kelley,

I finally got our library to get Solitaire, and I read it in two days. What an amazing work! Thank you for writing it… my thoughts will be crunching away at some important ideas for a long while.

I went back to re-read “And Salome Danced,” and read much of the conversations about what whether Mars was male or female. I noted that most of the conversational focus was on Mars, and less was on the gender ambiguity that Jo(e) presents.

In your last paragraph in “The Erotics of Gender Ambiguity”, you write:

I guess [this story] might be construed to be warning us against absolute refusal of a stable gender identity. I say ‘˜guess’™, because I’™m speculating, and can’™t be sure I haven’™t made a mistaken inference somewhere along the line. It’™s tricky, thinking about these things. But the important thing, is that we do think about them, we do inquire about them, without ceasing.

…and I thought, wow. I really must be in a different place. If that’s true, I wonder how I got here.

The background is that I was raised to be a girl, but the tomboy in me refused to be quiet. In fact, I could never imagine myself either male or female. I was just me, with a girl’s body parts, but without any sense of how or where I fit into the gender continuum. I have failed my whole life to present any particular way.

During my college years, I decided to look into gender reassignment, but never followed through on it, because I would feel no more male than I feel female. I have friends who are biologically female, but whose name and (sometimes) gender expression is decidedly male.

You bet it confuses people. But perhaps a warning “against absolute refusal of a stable gender identity” is less…needed? Many people consider my friends and acquaintances sexually appealing, and their continual gender morphing non-threatening.

My partner is a minister, and she often complains that the point she tried to get across in her UU (Unitarian-Universalist) sermons was completely missed. I fear that I may have done just that with your wonderful story, but I thought I might ask you your thoughts about my experiences/interpretations.

Thanks for your amazing writing!

Janine

Hi Janine,

And thank you for taking the time to read it and think/feel about it. I appreciate it.

But I do think you have misread. “The Erotics of Gender Ambiguity” is not my essay, it’s an online discussion by feminist critics, writers and academics of “Salome.” I didn’t participate in it at all. The quote you’ve referenced was by Timmi Duchamp, the editor of Aqueduct Press and the author of a formidable oeuvre of feminist fiction and criticism.

Looking at the formatting of the title of the piece, I can see how it might appear that I was claiming authorship of the discussion rather than the story itself. I’ve made some changes to clarify that.

Timmi has a lot of cool ideas about gender and other issues. But I don’t agree with all of them, including this speculation about “Salome.” I don’t at all see the story as arguing against refusal of stable gender identity. That’s not what I intended when I wrote it, for sure. Not that such a reading is necessarily “wrong” — simply that is not my reading, and was not part of my writing. But we all bring different concerns and interests and experiences to our reading of fiction, and those things filter our response to it… and so the responses of the online panel are fascinating to me, all these different perspectives brought to bear on the work. Very flattering, honestly, to have so many people talk about something I wrote. I love that ability of fiction to engender (hah! I made a pun!) this kind of engaged conversation.

But my conversation would be — has been — different. The essay “Identity and Desire” is my response to the online discussion, and that’s where you’ll find my then-ideas about gender. My most recent (published) thoughts are in this interview at the Aqueduct blog. I think you’ll find my notions are a lot more in line with yours (grin). I’d love to hear more about what you think.

I never felt like much of a “girl” growing up. As you’ve said, I was just me. I have been through phases of not really expressing gender in any active way; I’ve made deliberate choices to transgress against the gender norms of my time/culture; and I’ve made deliberate choices to express myself in “normed” ways as a source of power and play. Mostly, I’m a mix. Nicola calls me a “gender warrior,” which I find amusing and cool, but really I’m not fighting. I am having fun. And I am, in fact, refusing a stable gender identity. I make my choices, and then when I feel like it, I change them. I no longer feel any need to justify them to anyone except myself — not to the cultural-normative-standards police, the feminist community, the women-over-forty-should-or-shouldn’t brigade… they can all go talk to someone else about their choices. I’ll be over here dancing.

Six minutes? Picnic!

Kelley,

I’m working on a class page for my high school physics students, and came across this quote. It made me think of you and Nicola…and your passion for life and writing.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’™t brood. I’™d type a little faster. –ISAAC ASIMOV, Life, Jan. 1984

Janine

Hi Janine,

Thanks for thinking of us (grin).

There are some days where I just might keep typing. Maybe. If I was right at the end of the Best Kelley Eskridge Writing Ever. Otherwise, I would go find my sweetie and spend the six minutes with her.

And today, if we get the six-minute warning, we may very well be on a picnic. We both have much to do today, many responsibilities and goals and blah de fucking blah. But the weather forecast shows that today and tomorrow may very well be the last two days of summer in Seattle… and we decided that we don’t want to miss them.

So today, instead of doing everything I am supposed to, I will be cooking potato salad and ginger-lemon scones, buying fried chicken and paté, chilling champagne, and spreading a blanket out in the back yard. Where I sincerely hope to be spending more than six minutes (grin).

I hope you enjoy your day as much as I hope to enjoy mine!