by Lucy Ellmann
‘She that will sliver and disbranch from her
material sap, perforce must wither
And come to deadly use.’
What we are witnessing in the Twentieth Century is a full-scale adolescent rebellion among artists, who self-consciously abuse their materials in order to aid their own creativity. The rough handling of paint, in such artists as Chardin and Manet, has developed into a ruffian’s art which is deliberately destined to disintegrate – the ‘I-don’t-fit-in’ syndrome, expressed through paint that doesn’t stick on.
At about 12.00, Fran turned off her typewriter, her desk-lamp and her gas-fire, and went to the kitchen to make herself a nice lunch of Tuna Fish au Gratin (open sandwich with toasted cheese on top, with which Fran had first become acquainted in her Junior High School Home Economics class). She consumed it along with a big glass of orange juice while reading Anais Nin’s erotica, but only the warm tuna gave her any sense of well-being. After throwing up, she turned her typewriter, her desk-lamp and her gas-fire back on.
Fundamental Facts about Food
How to Eat for Health, Strength and Efficiency
1. Make either breakfast or the noon-meal the hearty meal of the day. Avoid heavy meals at night.
2. Take care to chew each morsel thoroughly. This greatly aids digestion and bowel action.
3. Drink four to six pints of water daily.
Rod called at 2.30 to find out what time they were going to meet at the pub that night. After she hung up, Fran began to feel a bit flustered. She went to have a look at herself in the full-length mirror in the hall. She squeezed herself into her tightest pair of jeans, by lying on her back on the floor and squirming around. Once they were zipped up, she took another look in the mirror. She took the jeans off and put on a track-suit.
It was cold outside, not a hint of sun, as she embarked on her run through Wivenhoe. She passed some little boys at the end of her road who jeered unintelligibly at her. Near the train station, a man said ‘Cor!’ in response to Fran’s bouncing breasts, and a little further on, a drunk moved out of a passageway in order to say, ‘Smile, Love. Can’t be that bad.’ Fran had to swerve to avoid touching him.
When she got home, she removed a rock-hard blueberry muffin from the freezer, wrestled the two halves apart, toasted, buttered and ate them. She tried to vomit afterwards but couldn’t, so let it pass.
10. Secure three free bowel movements
daily by the abundant use of fruits,
Sanitarium Cooked Bran, greens and
other laxative foods, such as Fig-Bran,
Branola, Vita-Bits, Fig Marmalade, Laxa,
Colax, Lacto-Dextrin, Psylla, Paraffin
Oil, Paralax or Paramels.
She had a bath, shampooed her hair again, shaved in deference to Rod’s American predilections, and put on make-up, Gentle Support tights, and a dark red velvet dress with a low décolletage. Around it she buckled a belt of gold chain. She slotted heavy golden globs into her newly punctured ear-lobes with some difficulty, and fastened the choker Rod had given her around her neck. It chinked against the earrings and rubbed against her collarbone every time she moved her head. She added a thick brassy bracelet to’the general effect, and then paused to admire the twenty-seven clearly distinguishable bones in her hand. Would Rod find her sexy for another day?
The dissonance, or discrepancy, between the way a medium has been used, and the overall effect of the work of art, is particularly glaring in illusionist art, where the material is forced to malign itself by looking like something it is not. The paint is made subordinate to a veneer it has itself created, and we become, like Pygmalion, dazzled by fantasy and unaware of the stone.
‘Réponds, réponds à ma tendresse!’
Out went the Candle, and we were Left Darkling
Basic principles of automatic latches – Speed and feed control – Four jaw and angle-plate chucking – Sectional views – Half views – Special attachments – Testing stresses in material – Temporary repair and salvage – Holding devices – Making split bearings – Piston troubles – Self-acting lathes.
Champaign-Urbana 1969
Fran’s parents were determined to help her with her weight problem. First, they took her to a psychiatrist who told Fran her father was trying to starve her. So then they took her to a dietitian who sent them home with a week’s menu. They were supposed to give her minute-steak for breakfast. Suzy wanted to have minute-steak for breakfast too, and soon the whole family was eating minute-steak for breakfast, none of them getting any thinner.
Fran began to eat non-protein in private, in the form of crumb-cakes. Suzy ate chocolate brownies on the way home from school. When she became allergic to nuts, she ate non-nutty brownies, and when she became allergic to chocolate, she switched to crumb-cakes.
Their father was writing the first of his many scathing attacks on Rubens who, up until then, had enjoyed quite a high reputation at the University of Illinois.
‘… His famous eroticism has, with changes in male taste, begun to seem increasingly eccentric. The inevitable expanses of slithering, indecipherable flesh, like a body turned inside out and stretched into infinity, tire the eye, and appal the mind. What can these women have been eating?’
All that summer, Suzy and her mother sat on the porch eating peaches in cream for breakfast. Blueberries, sometimes. Fran was at music camp: she was particularly good at double-tonguing.
Fran struggled to get her violet knickerbockers on fast, before the other girls came back from swimming. How she hated swimming en masse – like ducks scrambling around for bread. The new thing today was to call Fran a commie because she’d declared her dissatisfaction with Nixon and the Viet Nam War. Fran grabbed her flute and got out of the cabin just in time. She walked under big pine trees, thinking how awful she looked in violet knickerbockers and Tyrolean suspenders and thick white socks and white blouses and baggy sweaters, in fact the whole stupid outfit that some sadist had considered appropriate for Michigan summers at some point for some reason. She arrived late for the mass flute class, and was treated to the standard public humiliation by the maestro. Afterwards, she went to the Lodge for a milk-shake and french fries. She spoke to no one. All the other girls were more beautiful, more Jewish, more popular. Some even had boyfriends in the Boys’ Section.
33. Avoid condiments – mustard,
pepper, pepper-sauce, cayenne, vinegar,
pickles – all the irritating spices and
condiments.
Suzy’s One Year Diary
Franny gives Mommy an unhappy birthday. She probably hardly realized. Franny isn’t always so nice to us anymore. She probably thinks we’re all a bunch of queer balls, though I think she’s the queer ball.
Today we went to Chicago. I bought a new culottes skirt, Franny bought a new suit, and Mommy bought a cute purple dress. At first I didn’t think it was fair that they got things with tops and I didn’t, but when we went to another store, Daddy bought me switchable sun-glasses, and that evened it all out.
Today we rehearsed the love scene. Scott sat down next to me, our legs touching, put his warm hands on my shoulder and we sat there, cheek to cheek. We practiced this a no. of times. I think I like him and he likes me.
Yesterday I lied to Melanie and told her that Scott really kissed me but he didn’t. This morning she went and told Scott that he had kissed me and maybe that I had told her so. If Scott ever did like me, he probably doesn’t now, and if he didn’t he probably never will, thanks to Dear Sweet Melanie.
Melanie and I went downtown to buy some sandals. We went to Arrnolds shoe store and found some nice sandals. They were too small in all the sizes the man brought. So I picked out a different kind I liked. After getting me some of those in another size, he went off to help another lady. We sat there about ten mins. waiting for him to come back, but he didn’t, so after slapping my knees and impatiently sighing ‘God!’ (and after we’d gotten everybody’s attention) we walked out. HA! HA!
&
nbsp; My 13th birthday. I started to menstruate. I told Mommy but told her not to tell Daddy. We had to tell Franny, so I could borrow some Kotex. Then we went downtown and bought pant suits. Mommy gave us the charge plate. For presents I got:
1 pant suit (from Mommy)
1 skirt suit (from Mommy)
1 blue shirt with stripes (from Mommy)
1 box Russell Stover candy (from Mommy)
1 pack personalized pencils (from Franny)
I decorated my cake. This was the best birthday I’ve ever had.
9.30 AM: I’m at school. Franny is taking day off. Mommy is in kitchen. Daddy in bathroom, occupied with morning defacation.
Mommy faints. Comes to. Vomits blood. Calls for Daddy. Franny hears. Franny calls for Daddy. Daddy hears. Comes downstairs. Calls hospital. Mommy says: ‘I think it’s a cerebral hemerage. Tell them to be careful with my head.’ Ambulance comes. They speed towards hospital.
4.00 PM: I arrive home. Note says ‘Suzy, Mommy and Daddy are at hosp. having tests.’ I think it’s just more thyroid tests – nothing serious. Franny comes home and tells me what happened. I cry a lot because I think it’s cancer, and she will die. I cry a lot. I can’t stop. I run and throw away all cigs in sight.
4.05: Ruth Pevner picks Franny and I up. We go to hosp.
At hospital – we walk into small room – put on white gowns and large plastic boots. We walk through the door. The third bed on the right: there lay Mommy. One eye covered by a gauze pad, the other eye uncovered. It did not open and was all red. A white bandage covered her head. I noticed they must have had to shave her hair. Beside her was the introveinous thing and the cardiagram machine. We stayed 10 mins. Then we spend evening with Ruth. We have for desert choc. Mousse. It’s abonabable.
There was once a gray house in which hot chocolate was drunk with marshmallows floating on the top. The kitchen drawers contained a haphazard collection of inherited silver souvenir spoons. Tasteful Niagara Falls ones from some honeymoon. A Chicago World’s Fair (1883-1933) spoon, with airplanes, domed buildings and the latest developments in bridge-engineering encrusted on its bowl. There was a whole set of president-spoons, commemorating a variety of achievements: Morse telegrams for Tyler (10th), and a horribly bumpy Berlin airlift for Truman, no good for anything except stirring. There was also a crowd of grapefruit spoons, with sharp-toothed edges: Daddy never passed a grapefruit spoon without buying it.
After another Neurological Event, my mother died. When Daddy told me, we stood there in the kitchen for a moment, and then clutched each other in sudden unexpected communion, sobbing the same strange sobs.
Mommy was buried in one of those cemeteries that has tiny plaques in the ground to make it easer to mow the grass.
No artificial flavorings or preservatives.
Various interpretations of the maternal role were offered us: some people brought lasagna, others took Franny and me on long drives to glimpse blindingly white, be-columned mansions built in the Colonial style.
Protose
A vegetable meat. One of the most interesting discoveries of modern times. Looks like meat, tastes like meat, smells like meat, has the composition of meat, and even the fibre of meat. May be cooked in all the different ways in which meat is ordinarily prepared – boiled, stewed, roasted, or broiled, or may be eaten cold, direct from the can.
A nun with a crush on our father moved in to await his infrequent returns. She told us what to eat, what to wear, when to do our homework and when to go to bed, taught us how to peel tomatoes, and told us we were lucky to have mirrors to discover our pimples in.
Trim the lozenge shapes and blanch in boiling water.
I took to reading the phone-book in my mother’s study, and acquired an endless supply of Kotex sanitary pads, transported home precariously on the handlebars of my bicycle – they were selling cheap.
Television adverts do not seem to care for people’s feelings anymore. When I and my two daughters were watching during a commercial break, to my horror an advertisement for sanitary towels was shown. Whatever next? Please take this off.
UNDER SATISFACTORY ENDOTRACHEAL ANAESTHESIA, AFTER THE USUAL PREPARATION AND DRAPING, THE MEDIASTINUM WAS ENTERED THROUGH A STERNAL SPLITTING INCISION. THE PERICARDIAL SAC WAS OPENED WIDELY, THE HEART WAS EXAMINED.
Suzy
KISS SOMEONE YOU LOVE WHEN YOU GET THIS AND MAKE MAGIC
This letter has been sent to you for GOOD LUCK. The original copy is in New England. It has been around the world nine times. You will receive Good Luck within four days of receiving this letter providing you in turn send it out through the mail. This is no joke.
Please send 20 copies to people you think need Good Luck. Do not send money as faith has no price. Do not keep this letter. It must leave your hands within 96 hours. An officer received 70,000.00. Joe Elliott received 40,000.00 and lost it because he broke the chain. While in the Philippines, Gene Welch lost his wife within six days after reading this letter because he failed to circulate it. However, before her death he received 7,775.00.
North London 1983
Confronted by so many naked behinds, each different, some perfect in their way, but most wavering in the balance, I considered the purpose of posteriors. They’re something to sit on, it’s true, but people with minimal buttocks do manage. Are they there merely to protect assholes? I decided their job was to blur social boundaries by looking equally incongruous on everybody. As I ducked into a dingy cubicle, I awarded the same function to feet. Ditto, ears, noses, and hair distributions. Big toes. Little toes!
I shoved myself into my blue-and-yellow-striped bathingsuit, with its misguided air of good cheer. After trying several arrangements of my breasts, I settled for the one involving maximum, if temporary, uplift. As I plodded out to the pool I became more and more conscious of my jiggling dimpled thighs. Feeling the solace of my irreverence towards the anatomy of othes recede somewhat, I delivered myself gratefully into the chlorinated camouflage.
A dark wet head bobbed nearby: a man was watching me. I hung on to most of my self-consciousness in his honor. When he was still observing me a width or two of the pool later, I began to tackle the remote possibility of being fancied more or less in my birthday suit. Must be a jerk. I swam some more, got red in the face, and checked my admirer again. He was still clinging to the side of the pool, immovable as a limpet, but now looking at someone else. I paddled on, relieved.
Back in the changing-room, I read through all the heart shapes adorning the walls of my cubicle. There it was made clear that Julie loved Colin T. OK, that Sharon & Donna & Patsy had formed some sort of liaison, that Pussy 4 Cocky, and that in fact love, like bottoms, is common to all.
INNOCENCE! One hour of GENUINE
housewives, young and mature ladies
with big tits. Never seen before.
I’d bought Colossus for its personal ads, which it claimed were Britain’s best, but they offered only frantic SM, thorough CP, stunning TV, unbearably ET (Erotic or Exquisite Torment), and enemas. Hardly worth buying the mag, which had been something of an Ordeal in itself. I’d managed it by assembling a pile of varied publications in front of the newsagent, along with a pint of milk and a packet of digestive biscuits. My guilt about the cookies somehow alleviated my shame about buying soft porn, and I was doing fine, I felt, until someone behind me called out for penis tissues.
Unphased, the cashier said, ‘Kleenex? Over there.’
I hurried out with my shady purchases, trying to look deadpan.
HUGE SUE (84-70-73), for lovers of
enormous ladies and well-filled knickers.
Where did she find Size 73 knickers, I wondered smugly to myself as I sat in my Morris Minor (four-door, unreliable in cold weather, naked prancing women painted by me along dashboard), munching digestive biscuits. Did all the ads for fat women reflect a hitherto imperceptible erotic trend, or just mass unemployment among sexually-inclined obese people? I turned to the fussier type of personal ad:
ARE
YOU OUT THERE? Ex-Company Director (75) seeks full-bosomed lady-friend (26-56) to share the gardening. Good sense of humour a help.
Reasonable-looking female, 37, emotionally vulnerable but essentially positive. Seeks sensitive, non-smoking male. Quick.
MALE, average build, likes TV. Seeks female soul-mate.
ME: Non-scene, blond, fit, attractive. YOU: Same.
Give A Girl A Chance! Lively vivacious plump career-girl, young 49 and solvent. Passion for all good things. Now looking for that genuine sincere somebody who’s into long-term hetero commitments, O.N.O. Long letter please. A.L.A.
BIG RICH SONUVABITCH wants HAREM of tall slim MODEL types (16-22) for HIGH JINKS on YACHT in CARIBBEAN. Recent photo and birth certificate.
PRETTY sporty girl wants KINKY guy. Anyone for tattoos?
I was beginning to feel a little dispirited by this remorselessly motivated crowd, each at a peak of purposefulness, resolved to avoid fatties, shelve the problems of a lifetime and go dating. The few that seemed at all possible admitted in the end to a taste for wind-surfing or D. H. Lawrence – dreadful to have to mooch around in a bathingsuit all day waiting for a fuck. I nestled deeper into my Morris Minor (which Jeremy had likened to a bathtub) and chomped cookies. I was thinking up my own ad:
FAT damsel-in-distress, own car, hair,
teeth, breasts, seeks extracurricular SEX
with a Prince Charming, or Semi—
Charming, to keep the wolf at bay.
I twirled the cookie-packet in the air to reseal it, stuffed it into the glove compartment behind old AA maps (a careful eater), and drove to the laundromat. There, stared at by the concave lenses of numerous washing-machines, sat two women discussing world affairs. One was sorting through piles of service washes while the other, a laundromat hanger-on, concentrated on finding new subjects to fret about.
Two young men came in to fetch their meagre, well-cooked wardrobes from the dryers. (Why do men go to laundromats with so few clothes? I wait till there are at least two rubbish-bags full.) The inactive woman asked them about someone called Maggie, so I assumed they all knew each other, but it turned out to be the opener for an inconclusive line of complaint against the Prime Minister. When the men had left, she instantly moved on to the subject of Men.