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About the Author
Gina Barreca is a professor of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut. Her books include They Used to Call Me Snow White, but I Drifted; Perfect Husbands and Other Fairy Tales; Babes in Boyland; and, with Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, I'm With Stupid. She's written or edited other books on vice, Victorians and sex, American humor, the erotics of instruction, The Sopranos, women's humor, and Italian-American literature. She will blog about teaching, sex, humor, money, publishing, ambition, books, marriage, envy (professional and personal), politics (professional and personal), aging, and cartoons.
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Featured Articles By the Author
FLASHBACK (1991): About Not Writing: A Poem
About Not Writing: A Poem
The way old ladies board the bus without correct change
I sit by screen and try to write without words.
At this hour I could say anything: call a friend
in a foreign country, wake her up
with an American jolt
or call the information operator
in Iowa and ask what the weather
is doing, now, which is earlier this evening, out there.
Speaking’s easy. My words might orbit the earth
forever as sound,
but really they’re as gone as smoke.
It’s only typeface that can kill you.
Bad phrases, like hangovers, inspire regret
or abstinence.
The poem I liked earlier
is a cheat: a fake credit card,
a phony id,
a hologram without a third dimension,
just some shine.
I leave the keyboard, moving slowly
as I will —
and not so many years from now either —
disembark the bus and avoid the driver’s eye
because change
is no longer currency
just as the keys,
fiddle
as I will,
no longer
jimmy the locks.
Comments
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not writing is the hardest writing of all
— nancy · Jul 14, 06:38 AM · #
She needs a good editor and to have pointed out that i.d. needs punctuation but the key-keyboard / lack of change thing is nice.
— Already Outdated · Jul 14, 09:11 AM · #
I rather like the phrase “a phony id” for its curiously Freudian resonance, whether intended or not.
— Anonymous · Jul 14, 03:12 PM · #
You think it was intentional? I don’t.
— Already Outdated · Jul 14, 06:36 PM · #