Sunday Stealing: the Scottish meme

Cheers to all of us thieves!

1. Where are you from and where do you live now? 
I'm from Sicily and I live in England. 

2. Favorite childhood story/book/film? 
Book: Margaret Mahy's "The Changeover". Movie: "Ladyhawke" 

3. If you could change gender for a day what would you do? 
Pee standing?

4. Do you feel you family is complete or would you like more/some children?
I'm not married and I don't have children. My family is more my circle of friends and feels pretty complete. Wouldn't mind having a girlfriend though.

5. What do you do/Where do you work and do you enjoy it? 
I'm a teacher. I effing love it.

6. Which three words do you think sum you up? 
Buddhist, happy, smartypants.

7. If you were a fairy what magical powers would you possess?
Telepathy.

8. If you were invisible, where would you go and what would you do? Why?
Ah, who cares.

9. What song can’t you listen to without crying?
Very weird, but it's "Cruz" by Christina Aguilera. It sort of marked the end of childhood for me.

10. Which book changed your life – or at least made you think a lot? 
"The Buddha in daily life" by Richard Causton. Awesome.

11. Why do you blog?
I run two blogs. This one is the kind of blog I would have liked to find when I was lost in transition in the Ukraine and hungry for anything lesbian at all. The other one is to talk about the daily life of Buddhist people.

12. What is your top ‘me-time’ tip?
Good food. Plenty of it. Good company. A good book. A hot shower. Common sense really.

13. What can’t you live without?
Lipbalm. I'd be lost without it.

14. Which of all your blog posts are you most proud of and why? 
On this blog, probably this one. On my other blog, maybe this one.

15. Have you ever met a famous person? Who and where?
I met a couple of famous people in Italy. Nothing too exciting really.

16. When did you last have a full nights sleep? 
Yesterday?

17. What would you think is harder: Going to work or staying at home with children? 
Being a working mother. 

18. What are you doing for Easter? 
I'm going back to Sicily to sleep. A lot.

19. What is your favorite drink? 
Coke.

20. Do you play any sports?
Yoga. Does it count?

21. What is your most embarrassing moment?
Maybe when I was caught having sex on the top of my building. 

22. How clever are you?
What a stupid question.

23. Name a new favorite TV show? 
Being Human, Sherlock (the BBC one), True Blood, Once Upon a Time, Dexter, Six Feet Under...

24. Any guilty pleasures?
The "In Death" series by J.D.Robb. And urban fantasies in general. I'm just addicted.

25. If you could have chosen your own name, what would it be? 
I love my own real name.

26. Who do you most admire in life, and why? 
My parents. And Nichiren Daishonin.

27. What is your most treasured possession? 
I could say my Gohonzon, but it's not a possession. Then I'll say my MacBook.

28. Tell your favorite funny joke… 
A girl goes to a laundrette with a stained dress and says:
- I need it for Thursday.
- Come again?
- No, gravy.

29. What is your biggest fear in life? 
Failure. Which I exorcise with plenty of Daimoku.

30. What is your favorite flavor of ice cream? What does it remind you of?
Chocolate! 

 

 

Lesbian jokes

Just for fun, a couple of lesbian jokes videos.

Lesbian humour on the YouTube

As I mentioned before, I spent the first months out of my own closet in the Ukraine, where my only access to anything remotely homosexual was the net.

This is probably the reason why I'm now doing this blog. It's the kind of thing I would have loved to have, to group together lesbian popular culture instead of having to research it myself and painfully find the good stuff amidst the tons of rubbish out there.

So this is a post about some interesting home-made videos I found on the YouTube.
Some of them are informative, others just funny ☺
 

I have my own personal ideas about videos on the YouTube. Too often they are just poorly made. No script, horrible sound, just a bunch of chicks (obviously given the topic, but actually not only) that babble in front of the computer.
Annoying.
Some videos, however, are just as I like them. Not too long, for starters. Broken down into points or little chapters, so that they just make sense, in a way. And with hot chicks. Well, ok, what they say is more important, but, let’s see the first one:

 Ten reasons to be lesbian

This girl is reeeeeeally cute. Apart from that, she also says some interesting things. A couple of her ‘reasons’ are not so obvious. They are:

1. Girls look good
2. They fuck much better
3. You don’t need that much make up
4. Straight girls like to play
5. You don’t need to dress that well
6. Girls understand each other
7. You don’t need to be fake (meaning: you don’t put yourself in competition with other girls)
8. You don’t need to watch TV anymore, because you already have enough drama in your life
9. The environment is small
10.  You don’t have to think about sleazy disgusting guys that stare are you (they don’t look at you anymore because they can see that you’re a lesbian)

It’s not like I totally agree, but it’s a nice video. Reasons 1, 2, 6, 7 are in my opinion very true. Reasons 3, 5, 10 are not so true in every case. I mean, the point of view of this girl is that of a ‘butch’ (for want of a better word) lesbian and these reasons don’t really apply to ‘femme’ lesbians. Point 4, 8 and 9 are just plainly amusing. I don’t know if I have to wish them to be right or wrong.

The same girl made another video to clarify the points about appearance. The video in itself doesn’t add much, but the final remark is bloody hilarious.
"Be real. And if you’re a lesbian, be a fucking lesbian! Ok?"
LOL 

Then we have this other girl, listing a lot of stereotypes connected with being a lesbian:

Let me to a little checklist:

Rainbows everywhere, especially tattoos  ✘  I don’t have tattoos and I quite dislike rainbows anyway
Short hair  ✔ 
They all want to be boys  ✘
G.I.Joe  ✘  but I used to watch ‘Fist of the Northern Star’ and ‘Tigerman’ does it count?
Tomboy  ✘  well, I was a bit of a tomboy when I was, like, two ☺ 
Secretly trying to convert people  ✘
Polos  ✔  I don’t think I own polos right now, but I don’t mind them
Sport bras  ✔  
Softball  ✔  and cricket, but I don’t play them anymore
Knives  ✘
Motorcycles and bars  ✘
Muscles  ✔
They don’t shave  ✘
Only have gay friends  ✘
They all watch L-word  ✔
STDs and sleeping around  ✘
Flannel  ✘
They hate guys  ✘
Low voices  ✘  
They work in construction and drive trucks  ✘
Men boxers  ✘
Ani di Franco, Teagan and Sarah  ✘  never heard of them in my entire life
They all identify with either butch or femme  ✘
Vegetarian  ✘ (I've been a vegetarian for two years, but I'm not anymore)
Birkenstocks  ✔ as with polos, I don’t own a pair right now, but I used to

Only 7 out of 25. Uhm...

Now, let’s talk about the different types of lesbian:

Just made a quick list as I watched:

Amazon, Baby dyke, Bull dyke, Butch, Femme, Diesel dyke / bike dyke, Hasbian, Lipstick lesbian, Chapstick lesbian, Ping, Sticks, Powerdyke, Androginous, Granola dyke, Pretty boi, Hipster dyke, Dykester, Softball dyke.

That's all for now :)

Murakami

A few years back, I made a wonderful discovery. I was in Romania, in my usual restaurant, sipping tea and using the internet (the only reason why I always went to that restaurant was to use the internet). I was at that stage in which I didn't have nothing to do anymore, but I wanted to take full advantage of the 3.5 RON I had parted myself from just for the privilege to use the internet. So, I started looking for things on Wikipedia. Sudden inspiration: let’s search for ‘Lesbian singers’. There ought to be a page, right? Wrong. (there’s a ‘Lesbian musicians’ page though). I got a list of pages, most of them stupid, but one caught my eye: Svetlana Surganova, Russian lesbian songwriter. Russian? Let’s have a look. The page is a stub, but the last line states that a certain ‘Murakami’ song has become a sort of lesbian anthem. Fine, let’s do some YouTube-fu (a specialised branch of Google-fu).

Oh, I’m in love with this song. I don’t know, it just makes me happy.

Ok, here is the link. I couldn’t find an official video, but I particularly like the sound of this one. That’s the lyrics:

Мураками

Солнце выключают облака.


Ветер дунул - нет препятствий.


И текут издалека
 вены по запястью?



Я люблю тебя всей душой.


Я хочу любить тебя руками...


Я люблю тебя всей душой.


Я хочу любить тебя руками...



Долгие застынут лица.


Мы изменимся нескоро.


Отражает мокрый город


самолетов вереницы.



Я люблю тебя во все глаза.


Я хочу любить тебя руками...


Я люблю тебя во все глаза.


Я хочу любить тебя руками...



Улетаешь?


Улетаешь?


над каштановым побегом,


в переплетах Мураками?


Я люблю тебя огромным небом!


Я хочу любить тебя руками...

Here you can find transliteration and translation of the song. I don’t care much of the translation, but it’s better than nothing :)

Oh, it’s just so Russian! How she speaks about the sky, and then it links it to details of her body, and it’s all just disconnected details that convey emotions so forcefully… reminds me a lot about Anna Achmatova (I remember defining Achmatova’s one a poetics of hands and gloves… it just occurred to me how lesbian it sounds all that attention to hands).

This woman is just so SO Russian. Love it.

It’s strange what things like this do to me. When I see a text (poetry, a song, the page of a book, anything), that has even a very low level of opacity, I become like a hawk, my eyes start gleaming. I just HAVE to solve the mystery of the words, understand the subtleties, the whys behind the choice of a word. Being a literature scholar (because this is what I am, no matter what I do for a living), is a lot like being a detective, or an archeologist of feelings, reasons, sounds, images. For instance, I’m dying to understand why Murakami. What does she mean by that? Curious.

The chorus is so explicit and so hot. As I said I don’t much care for the translation given in that link. There, they say “I love you with all my soul / I want to love you with my hands”. Now, she never says “my”. Never.

So, ok “I love you with all soul” doesn’t sound right (Russian language doesn’t bother with articles) and we can add a “my”, BUT the possessive in the second line just doesn’t work for me. I don’t feel it as a personal, possessive act here. I feel it as a reference to a WAY of loving. “Loving with hands”. Making love with, and through, hands. Not just hers. Like: “I want to hand-love you”.

I don’t think she omitted the possessives for necessities of rhythm, I think she did it on purpose. But, hey, that’s only MHO. And then, I think that here речь идёт тоже о музыке. I mean, look at her playing that guitar of hers, isn’t she just hand-loving her guitar?

And that “Улетаешь?”. Oh, Russian is so multilayered. All the verbs of movement that sport the suffix u- acquire a sense of permanency. You don’t just go, or leave, or fly away. You go forever. That little u is the preamble for a farewell. So where is she going? Why is she flying away? Or maybe the flight (побег is ‘flight’ as in ‘fleeing, running away’) is not a physical one, maybe she’s running away with her mind. Or maybe, she’s flying with pleasure, and that’s the reason for that u-, for she’s going to her private realm of pleasure, the one where no-one can follow her.

The last two lines:

“I love you with a vast sky / I want to love you with hands”

Both the “with’s” (as the ones in the chorus) are translated from the instrumental case (огромным небом / руками). I love the instrumental case. How can I explain that… it’s so fascinating, because it’s immediate. No need for prepositions that shift the attention, no messing around, no chance to misunderstand (‘with’ means a lot of things) you just state the instrument (the sky, the hands), and it’s immediately there. It’s perfect. Just perfect. I’ve always loved the instrumental case. It just clicks.

Enjoy :)

Lesbian books

As I mentioned in a previous post with regards to the L-thing I had a totally ‘Ewa’ reaction. I started reading. A lot. Ok, I love reading anyway, and, oh, it might have had something to do with the fact that I spent my first year out of my own closet in ex-communist homophobic countries, where I didn’t have any access to fellow lesbians who could take me under their wings and teach me. So, go websites! And blogs! And forums! And… well, you got the idea. I then found a… let’s call it a stash of lesbian-themed eBooks, and with my utmost delight I was able to start a more bookish stage of my education. In the past three years I read a great amount of lesbian-themed books (I also read other stuff, mind you, like some Spanish novels for instance).

Now I want to write a little about these books, and also all the lesbian-related stuff I could find in my records (I’ve been keeping this diary of the books I read every month since 1998, which I copied onto a Numbers file when I got my MacBook, so I have a complete list of all the books I read in the past fourteen years at hand… nerd, I know). I’m gonna write whatever I feel like about each book. No rules. I listed the books in chronological order starting with the one I read first :)

This list is crazy long already, not to mention always growing, so I decided to split it into several parts, to make it more accessible. I will start with...

VARIOUS LESBIAN-RELATED BOOKS I READ BEFORE WAKING UP

The Sopranos, Alan Warner.

My mother gave me this one when I was a teenager. Read it in Italian. It’s about a group of girls in Scotland, who go to a Catholic school and sing in the choir (hence the title) but are actually the exact opposite of a good little Catholic girl. If I remember correctly there is five of them, each with their distinctive story and background. It gets slightly depressing sometimes, considering they all, more or less, come from poor families and live in squalid places, and have a lifestyle (lots of alcohol, clubbing, neglecting school, etc…) that will not improve their lives not in the least. Anyway one of the characters is some sort of alpha female of the pack, and she is lately involved in a lesbian relationship. Very hot scene in which the other girl plays the cello naked before having sex… always fantasized about cellos after that. I mean, it’s such a sensual instrument! I wrote a story in that period, about a busker cellist with a Russian name… but anyway, nice book.

Shroud for a Nightingale, P.D.James

She is one of my favourite detective fiction writers. This book is not lesbian fiction, but there is a lesbian couple in it. That’s it :)

Fried green tomatoes at the Whistle Stop cafe, Fannie Flagg

Oh, I luuuuvd this book. And I drooled a lot on all the descriptions of awesome Southern foods! I read that in Italian as well. It’s a very famous lesbian book, and there is also a very famous movie, although the lesbian part was somewhat ‘censored’ in the movie. I mean, it’s there, but it’s not that explicit. It was the first time I read about a ‘normal’ lesbian relationship, between two women who loved each other, worked together and raised a family. Not the usual oversexed wicked lesbian character you would see in movies or the out-of-control girl lezzing up. Also, the lesbian part was not the ONLY interesting thing in the book. 
 

Orlando, Virginia Woolf

This is often mentioned in LGBT lists, although I wouldn’t know where to put it. It’s the only book by good ol’ Virginia that I managed to finish (I was bored to death by all the others). It’s good. I mean, weird, but good. The movie is great. I’ve had a crush on Tilda Swinton since then. Oh, I love redheads….

Carmilla, Joseph Sheridan le Fanu

Another one that’s often cited in LGBT lists, which also happens to be a classic vampire book. It's actually a novella. 
I… ar, don’t remember much. I was probably too young when I read it and I found it rather boring and a bit full of itself (if you can say that of a book). Maybe I should reread it someday.

Twelve dozen dialogues, Pierre Louÿs

Now THAT’S a treat. This guy is absolutely crazy. So politically incorrect, blasphemous and exaggerated! There are many things in this book (and in his work in general) that I loathe, some recurring themes that are, well, a bit too dirty for me ☺, but this book is great. It’s basically, as the title says, a series of short vignettes with lovers engaged in sexual activities. Dialogue only. Many of them are lesbian couples, although they never define themselves as such. This guy manages to make things so unbelievably outrageous that you can’t stop laughing. So comical.

New life

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Island!

After more than a year of slowly fading and almost dying, I decided to start this blog again, but to completely reorganise it.

A bit of background first. A few years back, I was in the Ukraine and I had a hopeless crush that was gnawing at me.

At the time I was writing a diary, and I wrote a lot of letters to this person, some of which I even sent, about all the things that were happening to me in the Ukraine.

After a lot of thought, I decided that all that stuff should not have stayed in my diary, and that it wasn’t really worth it to send the letters off anyway, so I decided to start blogging.

I created an identity, Ewa Munchkin, to sign my blog, and started off. Evil Munchkin was one of the many nicknames that were given to me - I had all sorts: dwarf, evil dwarf, Gollum, hobbit, smurf, smurfette… yep, you guessed right, I’m short. Not an actual dwarf at 5ft1, but still shorter than average. I happened to like Munchkin more than all the other names, so I added a first name with a Slavonic feel (after all, I was in the Ukraine, and I’m a Russian major. Yes, I know Ewa is Polish, but I happen to also speak a little Polish).

Now loads of things happened to me in the past year, and my blog was more or less abandoned. Not that many people were really reading it, aside from the memes I started doing after a while.

As I decided to start it again, I realised I needed a clearer focus, so I came to the conclusion I needed TWO blogs.

I started a new one, entirely dedicated to Buddhism, and I decided to reboot this one with a much clearer focus.

The focus of this blog is going to be lesbianism, especially lesbianism in popular culture (mostly books, movies and music). After realising I was gay, I spent the first year out of my own closet in ex communist, homophobic countries where the only access I had to anything remotely lesbian was popular culture, and considering I start off as a literature scholar, I basically approached this topic with the same rigour I would apply to any literary research. So I will periodically write reviews and opinions on anything lesbian I discover.

I will also do lots of memes, just because I like them a lot!

I will add a disclaimer: there will be a lot, and I mean a lot, of random faffing about literature. No, I'm not trying to show off (ok, maybe a little), it's just second nature to me, and I have very few people I can actually talk to about these things, so I need some place to get it out of my system! ^^