Male and female Dec. 12, 2013

  

As I said previously, I downloaded all her stories from work into my kindle.

I read them sometimes, before I start writing my own news stories as a kind of warm up and inspiration.

Our former temporary boss was right in claiming she was the best writer on the staff, even if she sometimes delved into the Satanic – by which I mean, she played clever sexual games, mostly for herself, I think, but perhaps a kind of tease for horny males like myself who might have perused her work.

She couldn’t do this with everything she had to cover, nor was it always as blatant as her story on the Pizza Man.

For me it has become a kind of entertainment to discover these themes in her stories, far lighter in content than her often dour poetry.

But unlike her poetry, her stories generally are straightforward and do not require the same scope of interpretation (which I sometimes get wrong) as her poems. So, I’ve rarely mentioned them here.

This week I went back to a story she did about a sculptor whose subject matter seemed to connect with her in a special way (making me jealous after the fact).

She opens her story with a description of the man striding triumphantly “though a tax wearily” around hi eight by eight food sculpted amalgam of the classic symbols for male and female.

He had a studio in the town she covered, but had won acclaim in Manhattan, and has come back into the concept of doing public art which “plays on, with and against its environment and the people in it,” (she wrote, showing off her ability to use parallel writing structure in what would otherwise be a boring news story).

This artist wanted to pay tribute to he adopted town (that same city she and I walked around in after a short time in the local diner and has become symbolic of something larger than life.)

The art work, she noted, takes two opposing two dimensional symbols and created a three-dimension form that “challenges the conventional ideas of gender while showing the public how two otherwise flat symbols translate in physical space.”

Male and female, the artist claimed, summed up all humanity,” but highly charged social symbols that allows people to come up with their own interpretations and like most of his word, taps into a person’s subconscious and sometimes affects their behavior.

Some people didn’t even notice the work hanging over their heads, some stared at it, some made out, suggesting they might have done more than just kiss had this not been a public place.

And you have to wonder if this thought crossed her mind as well and whether or not she acted on it.

She wrote this piece in April 2012, at a time when we were connecting, and she had her working out thing with the rapper from a local bar.

Writing about sex without actually mentioning the act must have been a fun diversion for her, although reading it now, after all that has transpired, it has depressing overtones, partly because of what she was back then, a light-hearted woodland nymph who teased with her talent and seemed free of any hostility. Playful and sensual, and I wonder, in light of her most recent poems, will she ever get back to that mental frame of mind, where she can be merely playful again.

 

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