Thank goodness women other than Linda Tripp have been recording this year — and two of them have just released terrific new CDs. Long before there was a Lilith Fair, Joni Mitchell set the stage — and the creative standard — for women who wrote, played and sang their own songs. Read more…
Rumors are swirling all over that Melody Brain Scott may leave the show when her contract expires. IF it turns out to be true it would be a huge loss for the show and the fans. Read more…
On Choosing Not to Reproduce
Authority
I wonder now whether my attitudes towards reproduction, parentage, fatherhood, and the responsibilities I would have are completely conditioned by society. Am I reacting against “natural” feelings that I would have regarding the children or child, or am I reacting against what I have been taught to believe are my responsibilities and duties? And so…is my antipathy towards these responsibilities just a reaction against compulsion from without?
A Stairway, A Sketch
This decision supposedly places me directly in opposition to the wishes about/from the body, and it is now literally (at times) as I had always imagined (projected?) my main conflicts to be: staring at my body across the table, or in a mirror, eyeing its desires, its potentials, what it claims to be its destiny and its main purpose in its life. What of my life? What of the life of the will, the personality, the mind, the parts of the body that are free from these desires? Are we (they) to have no part in the decision? Are we to just bow before the “lesser” (baser) will of the body because we are told (by the body, by the world, by the way the body interacts with the world and its own desires…most of all by the way the world seems to reflect its desires, the way that the world fits into its desires like interlocking puzzle pieces) that this is the way it must be? With the despair of not reproducing, of feeling like I am missing something in my life that not only should be but which is almost a divine (or natural) mandate, comes into conflict the opposite despair (fear) that to reproduce is to miss what I consider my destiny (yes, illusion), something that I will not achieve if I have to care for children or, what’s worse, I have the responsibility for other lives, a responsibility I could not take lightly and which would change my life forever: changing my character, my goals in life, my pleasures and pains. Is the fear of fatherhood a fear of change?
How many miles to Babylon? Four-score miles and ten.
Can I make it by candlelight? Yes, and back again.
Have you seen the snow so high? Have you watched the winter roll by?
Sky so blue, ground so plain, I’m somewhere in between. Read more…