In 1991 I was an outspoken preteen feminist, and it was an exciting time to be a feminist in Canada, because this woman, Gwen Jacob

was working on winning the right for all of us Canadian women to go topless. Yessss! As a ten year old who didn’t understand all the issues, like equal work for equal pay, or violence against women, or… nevermind…anyway, I could tell that this issue was an obvious one. 

This was and is Legal:

As a ten year old girl, I wouldn’t like to look at that man with his big hairy useless nipples, but there he is, he has his rights.

And this is Legal: 

Insert photo of a woman’s body, all but ‘legally’ undressed, sexually displayed and unnaturally posed, culturally broadcast far and wide in Calvin Klein’s context, Cosmo Magazine’s Context, A phone sex line’s context, but  never her own natural context. I won’t reprint one. We’ve all seen plenty.

As a ten year old girl I had seen enough of those images, and they made me feel uncomfortable, and I see the same discomfort on the faces of little children who see them today, when they are displayed more, and more graphically. But I digress. 

1991. I did like swimming in the bare, and I did like playing kick the can on hot summer nights, and I did like running around in the dust with my brothers, who never though to cover the same flat little nipples that I had at that time. But my flat nipples were becoming something else- Not yet biologically. Socially. They were becoming something not wholly my own, something fused other people’s reactions to them- with the male sexual gaze and with social condemnation if they were worn freely- and fused with the feeling of shame.

1991. This is illegal:

And this:

Law Struck down, 1991. Go Canada. Ten-year-old Hilde has a private topless feminist party in her room, plays her Paula Abdul tape loud. 

Okay. Here we are, 2012. Women going around topless? No, we aren’t. It is still very uncomfortable to do so, and I am aware of this because I currently enjoy functioning breasts. When I see this image: 

I am heart-happy like the rest of us. Nothing could be more peaceful, more natural. Also, I am envious. Noticed how the whole torso is exposed so baby can switch breasts easily. Notice how very relaxed, how un-self-conscious Mamma and baby are. Many blogs on the internet are devoted to sharing beautiful photographs of women breastfeeding, but few of these pictures are of North American women. That’s because women breastfeeding publicly in north america don’t look at-peace. We are fidgety, awkward, often more concerned with covering up or with fighting an internal battle against social discomfort than with enjoying the opportunity for nourishing love that each feeding can be. Lest we get to caught up in romanticizing the breast feeding of another culture, I’ll repost my own favourite public breastfeeding photo. 

Public BreastFeeding in Canada, 2012, a best case scenario:

In this picture I am in the Abbotsford Tim Hortons (what could be more downtown Canada?), and I am doing my best to enjoy feeding my baby, despite the fact that there are stares and whispers. I am not doing enough to cover up. I feel the burden of other people’s reactions. I feel as though I am a needless exhibitionist. It was a hot day. Tugging on shirts while feeding a baby in an unfamiliar environment is a pain. I would have loved to have been completely topless in this photo. But that other breast, the extraneous breast, there is no excuse for it- it bears the burden of shame.

Why don’t women in Canada excercise the 1992 ammendment to obscenity laws?

Because shame is a feeling that burns. 

Because culturally, a breast still belongs more to the male sexual eye than to its woman. 

Let’s have a look at breastfeeding in North America, a worst-case scenario:

This woman (does she look like she’s ever been pregnant?) is advertising something called a Nursing Cover. It is ugly, it is awkward, it is bulky, worst of all  it prevents the woman from seeing her baby and thereby adjusting her latch, or assessing  the comfort and mood of the baby. The baby is stuffed into a ridiculous tent, with the breast-of-shame. As nursing covers become more common, I feel pressure to wear one. In the state of Massachusetts, home of Harvard University, the nursing cover is the recently won compromise to obscenity laws which prevent public breastfeeding! The irrepressible Ben West suggests that women in the United States mount a campaign to rebrand this contraption the ‘Nursing Burqa.’ Culturally insensitive as this is, there’s a point to it. 

Some women are shy. I get it. But for the most part, we women have overcome the shame of wearing pants and bearing our ankles.  So is the culture evolving gradually to allow women to expose whatever amount of breasts they like without bearing an overwhelming burden of shame? It is not. The breast remains a line in the sand because it remains such a potent source of advertising revenue, pornography revenue, and shame, and opression. The breast is a physical location where every woman becomes other, becomes object. The only remedy is….

Breasts Breasts Breasts! Summer of 2012,  Bare Your Breasts! Bare them for us all! Bare them on the beach, bare them in the street, Bare them at the park, bare them at the dinner party! Breastfeeders, bare them proud, you are the reason we are called mammals. Women, i hereby challenge you to go topless at least once in the last  days of summer 2012.

A proposal: There is a little-known but new and growing holliday called Go Topless Day. This needs to blow up. Celebrated last year on August 28th, it would be perfectly timed for the August Critical Mass bike ride, which is usually the ‘wedding themed ride’- badly in need of reclamation as the Topless Ride, I’d say. Topless Bikeriding feels great, by the way. The air around your breasts is scientifically designed to be ‘breathable.’ 

One more proposal before I turn your breasts loose on the world: what are we going to do with the waste problem created by these nursing covers? 

Let’s use them to help us deal with the really obscene visual blight in the world: the hunters of endangered animals who fill the villainous pages of Sports Afield magazine, Sworn Enemy of this blog. Don’t you forget it, Sports Afield! This woman and her breasts are out to get you.

Kaza!

Thanks to Lisa Corcoran and her breasts for these appropriate nursing cover images.

I can feed maple leaves to the goats. They know it is a social thing. They like it, and I like it. The goats are covered with bristly fur. Actually, it is hair, like I have. They chew with a mouth like mine. They think about playing, and eating, and they think about how they love the mountains with a mind not unlike mine. But a chicken… 

What is she thinking?

The Chicken: aggregate of feather and hollow tubes, she is architecture of fluff, bathing in the dust, six inches of complex feather arrangements surrounding what little flesh she has, she is surprisingly light when we pick her up- which we could only do against her wishes. She seems to be made of feather, the love of foraging, and barnyard drama. I can penetrate no further into this fowl mind. 

What is she thinking?

I can observe. Her fidelity to Chanticleer, the older Leghorn rooster: total. Violently she eschews the advances of the up-and-coming exotic Americauna rooster, the other rooster, that one called Toothy.

Toothy!

She and her sisters cluck about him all day long: “Did you see how he tried to get at her?” “My Stars!” “Sneaky!” “And so Rough!” But ladies, I must ask, is he only so rough because he is so frustrated, so universally shunned? It is best to leave one’s feminism at the chicken gate. 

Indeed, no human ideas seem to apply to these soil-scratchers, these worm-catchers, these dust-bathing egg-hatchers. The cock their heads at me to ascertain intent, and they are never satisfied. What are they thinking? And what am I thinking? that beedy eye betrays no thoughts that I can recognize. What is in the bird brain? Most people are at least a little bit afraid of chickens. They swarm picnics. They don’t seem to feel fear. They don’t respond to swatting or herding in a way I could call logical. But human logic is my yardstick, and it is not up to the task of understanding the barnyard.

What is she thinking?

Now take these goats.

They make milk. They are motivated to mouthe, to suckle. They have teats. This is why we have these goats, here, wild and mountainous and trouble-making in our barnyard: For the delicious, musky miracle of their milk. I also make milk, and my little babe suckles and suckles and suckles. 

She is a milk-fed babe, and like those milk-fed pumpkins of legend, she is nice and fat, enormous really: a prize-winner, juicy with life, her upper lip sparkling in the sun. 

Even dads have nipples, just in case

This is the reason for the whole Phylum: Mammalia. Mammaries. Milk. The breast. The breast our first love and milk our original food, suckling our first obsession, the nipple our fresh-from-the-womb replacement for the constant rush of life from the umbilical chord, sweet warm milk our reward at the end of the treacherous trip through the birth canal. This is the reason we call our galactic home The Milky Way. Our ancestors looked into the night sky and saw the sweet twinkling beads of the Mother Goddess’ milk, squirting across the cosmos. My baby nurses with her arms wrapped around my breast like someone trying to hug a giant Sequoia. So I can look at these goats, and the neighbour’s cows certainly, and grandma’s dog, even a whale, or a lion, or a monkey, I can look them all in the eye, and know a little something.

Sweet beads of twinkling milk. 

But take yonder broody hen in the barn. 

Four little fluffy peep-peeping babes she has- not even her own, likely, you know, she just took it into her unfathomable head one day to sit down on a nest where the girls had all been laying, and she stayed sat until the eggs cracked open. Who knows- one of these little ones could have even been fathered by the sneaky and aggressive Toothy! 

But how does she feed these little sweet fluffs? There’s no milk! No milk, no heartbeat connecting , no umbilical chord mediating between mamma and baby. There’s just these eggs, these self-contained little hard pods of breakfast, but because this hen decided to sit down one day in June, there’s baby chicks, emerging perfect and ready to eat solid foods, twenty one days later!

Now how can I relate to that? There’s no milk! Got milk, mother hen? She hasn’t. She has two sets of claws and a sharp beak, and a plan to show her babies how to use their own. All my babe has done, at three months old, is mouthe a little strawberry pulp. She treated it like a nipple made of fruit.

It was the rooster, at last, who reached me. Not the teen-aged and exotically plumed Toothy, of course, but the elder statesman and favorite of the ladies, Chanticleer the leghorn.

I think I know what she’s thinking

I stood in the barnyard on a fine spring morning and it was in gratitude, a morning of my heart beating out thanks, thanks, thanks, and in this gaze my eyes hit the eyes of Chanticleer, and he was doing the same, he was thanking the Great Mother Hen in the sky, and he knew that I saw his heart, and I knew that he saw mine, and none could say which of us was more surprised.

Not releasing me, gripping with his beady look this first precious connection between us, he leapt smoothly onto the back of the hen directly in front of him, and he mated with her, staring at me the whole time. These things, finally, I can share with a chicken. 

Like all writers, I produce mass quantities of throw-away journaling-  anxieties recorded, dreams, and tons and tons of caffeinated stream-of-consciousness silliness. Most of it never gets a second glance, but I found this one and it frankly cracked me up. So if you’ve ever seen me in a coffee shop scrawling away as if it was something important, or have seen the towers of scribbled up graph paper notebooks at my house, what’s actually going on is like this:

Ever since Michelle Obama came into the sordid picture (of my love life!) I’ve been doing a lot more baking. I bake to the tune of her heart, which is pumping extra fast to expel all the tea and hot chocolate. All the women who write for allrecipes.com insist that singing or laughing over your baking will make the bread tast like love/home/Gradma/puppies/some of the less sexy First Ladies.

I insist that having a fight over your baking will make the cake a masterpiece of triumph, or despair, or floury angersex on the kitchen floor. I don’t know which, dear bakers, this is up to you. Either way, tasters will clutch their breast and try to keep these strong emotions to themselves. Its not seemly to show such feelings.

That’s why I started my own website, recipestodestroyamerica.com,

which has become such a success that I should be rich, what with representatives from Walmart and Gucci always taking me to lunch and trying to seduce me over the Cristal and pear cobbler to let them advertise on my website their own lines of fashion designed to look as though it was created by crafto-lution-istas in their downtown lofts, fashions inspired by the Indie slogans ‘Rivet till it burns’ and ‘suck my left one.’

Sure, I could take the money and pretend, as have many before me, that all this co-option is actually a hyper-sophisticated element of destroying America, but that would be a lie.

Even Michelle Obama knows this. She told me, this morning, from the bed in the downtown loft apartment  which is also the headquarters for recipestodestroyamerica.com, while she thoughtfully chewed the Cherry USSS (United Soviet Socialist Strudel) I’d heated up for her in the biodeisel powered microwave I had made specially for my onsite recipes. 

Good God! This is more relevant now than ever! Obamas 2012! 

A sheep named Rose is shorn, and she shakes off the trauma and returns to the barnyard, where her friend John rubs her skin. His hands come back to him smeared with grease, Rose’s waterproofing grease, her own precious Lanolin.

Her wool-nobody has time to wash and card and spin it in Rosedale these days- is stuffed into a green garbage bag, left in the barn.

Years later, Rose the sheep is dead and burried under the new willow in the back field, but her wool remains in the green back where John, grown and returned, finds it and brings it upstairs to where he lives in the loft above the barn with his wife Hilde, and he shows her the wool, and remembers to her the story of rubbing his greasy friend Rose, his hands smelling for a week afterwards.

The wool has a barn smell now, overtop of the Lanolin smell. Hilde uses it to winterproof their little house, and there is so much of the wool left that she decides to learn woolcraft, and wonders if she can take off the barn smell but keep the smell of Lanolin, Lanolin, which she learns will be what protects her nipples all through feeding the baby that grows inside her, Lanolin, ancient and best nipple protector. Hilde daydreams that Rose is still alive, and she can just go downstairs and find Rose in the barn in the spring, and rub her wool, then rub the nipples to keep them from cracking. 

As Hilde learns in a washtub how to coax the thick coating of Lanolin off raw wool, John buys her a new pair of granny-knit mittens. After Hilde dries her hands she coats them in Rose-scented hand cream. She rides her bike around Rosedale in the mitts, and when she has worked up some heat, she lifts the mitts to her nose: Lanolin, Rose, Lanolin, Rose, Lanolin, Rose.  

Picture this:

kd Lang and Wayne Gretsky, eating avocado rolls on the patio at a very fine little out of-the-way Japanese restaurant in LA, chatting about the glory days of Edmonton. That’s right, 1983-1990. Edmonton owned the world then, and it was thanks to these two.

“this place has the best Saba”

“Meat is murder. Pass the ginger, Great One.”

Cowboys and Long Haul truckers of North America had as their late night soundtrack Concept Country and Western Music produced by a Canadian vegetarian lesbian. And the Oilers. The Oilers in the 80s! The last Old Master of Canadian Hockey, a fine young Ukrainian- Canadian prairie boy, with finnesse, fine manners, and speed on his side, reminding the world just who owned the game, and which nation, exactly, is referred to in the phrase National Hockey League. Edmonton in the 80s. Happenin! 

I don’t know if all this had an effect on you, where you lived, but at the time I was a child in a town called Dawson Creek- we’re talking cold hostile people in a cold hostile climate, everyone hating the town and certain the outside world didn’t exist for them, anymore, their chance was over, they had just better stay in Dawson, and work at the sawmill, and for God’s sake don’t hope for anything nice out of life.

But Wait!

1983! Wait a galdarn minute!

Just six away by car, Edmonton! Winning Cup after Cup! Why, that’s the home team! And they’ve got culture, too, that kd Lang is a fine country and western singer! Why, she won six Junos this year (And collected them in a wedding dress, which made total un-ironic sense to me at the time, as an 8-year-old)

Is this pride, this feeling in my chest?

I think it’s time to bring up the Mall. Some of you readers may not know this, but Edmonton is home to the World’s Largest Mall. World’s. Largest. Mall. Floor three is a water park with over 50 waterslides and a giant automated wavepool. Two roller coasters in the basement. On the top floor they only sell fur coats and cars. This is a big deal. Edmonton was tops. I only made the trip a few times, as a kid, but it was sort of like going to Disney Land, only Disney Land was winning the Stanley Cup all the time 

and was home to the singer of Big BonedGal. 

Am I feeling something I shouldn’t be feeling?

I like to think about kd and Wayne, now, because they both live in LA, and maybe they don’t like each other, maybe they never get together to talk about the old days, but I bet they have a lot of good memories.

Did Wayne ever smoke hash with kd and the Reclines backstage?

Did the mall ever double-book them? Did they ever have affairs with the same woman, some ultra glamourous Queen of the Edmonton Scene?

All this was on my mind, recently, while I was visiting in Northern Alberta with two friends who grew up together in Edmonton. They talk like this: ‘Oh yeah, Daddy-O’s downtown makes that Banannas Foster’ and “Remember When we worked across from each other at the food court in the Mall, but then you got amazingly promoted out of the Frozen Yogurt Caste and into the Club Monaco Caste” and “The River Valley at this time of year” and so on.

And I got to thinking about all the people I know from Edmonton, how they all share this hard-boiled true-heartedness, and how they all really know how to put together a dirty old winter jacket and a scarf, I mean, these people know how to look good on a thrift-store budget in a dirty-winter-town.

So of course I’d say to these Edmonton friends, “I want to go to Edmonton!” expecting them to say, “Yeah! we’ll meet you there and show you all the cool spots! We can go to the Mall! World’s Largest Food Court! Awesome!” Or something like that. Instead they did this: “Nooooooo Hilde noooo don’t go to Edmonton” “Noo Noooo don’t start thinking you want to go to Edmonton.” And when questioned, they’d just shake their heads. They shook their heads.

What happened, Edmonton? There is no resolution here. This is a question. Edmonton, how have you so fallen from grace in the eyes of your own children? This blog demands answers.

This summer at DCMF my friend J——- broke into the basement of a historical building in Dawson. He found a lot of garbage, and a gold rush era shovel, and this previously unpublished poem, signed Robert W. Service! Because of the illegal nature of the find, this blog has the  exclusive scoop! Critics will no doubt soon be cranking out papers about Service’s new rhyme-free style, but here at Cat Dragged In, we can just enjoy this poem for what it is: a heartfelt farewell to the Yukon.

Goodbye Yukon

You wild girls running cold and naked on the beach

You loud loud saunas, ringing steam and wet hair dripping snow melt water on the rocks

You backwoods boys with your ragged beards and hands, hunting knives from your fathers, also some conservatism from your fathers, but hearts hot for the Goddess, that’s from your mothers

You deep winter makeout parties with all the beauties in moonstone jewelry

Goodbye Yukon, frost-bearded husband blissful in starlit snow on the hill, with a sled and a thermos, under the new moon

Goodbye Yukon

I dreamed picking cranberries in the forest- they were still bitter, and in the dream i couldn’t find any kinikinick, but someone was turning into a bear by way of a dog

Goodbye endless forests, forests like santa clause, forests like a glitter parade, forests like dragon’s treasure, forests like a fat woman- so many trees, so many trees

It’s supposed to be dry here but it rained the whole summer. I have never seen such a scheming bunch of arrogant and obese gophers 

Goodbye Yukon. How will my heart find itself without your dark, your blue, your cold?

-Robert W. Service

Historical Facts.

May Twenty-Ninth, 2009: Jian Ghomeshi,

Host of popular Canadian Radio Program Q, interviews Gordon Lightfoot,

Canadian songwriting legend. According to the CBC website, One blogger noted that Ghomeshi’s interview with Gordon Lightfoot was “nothing less than seminal,”

Same Day, simultaneously, Sasquatch,

no context needed, intercepts the interview Via low-Fi Backwoods transistor radio. Lightfoot, as we all know, speaks at a frequency which Sasquatch cannot hear. Sasquatch assumes, naturally, that these questions are directed towards himself, and answers with a candor and vulnerability that one blogger describes as the cat’s ass. Happily, a CBC radio technician was in that forest that day, and he captured the moment.  

Excerpts Now, from both interviews

Ghomeshi: You are a legend

Lightfoot: Well now, that’s, that’s an honor, but come on (laughs) I’m still alive, man!

Ghomeshi: So, do you think that there is a unique Canadian Songwriting identity?

Lightfoot: Oh, yes, without questions, I think there is a unique Canadian Songwriting identity

Ghomeshi: Why do you think that is?

Lightfoot: I think it’s because of the Celtic heritage in Canada. Many Canadians have Celtic ancestry- Scottish ancestry and Irish ancestry, and I think that runs in the soul, the soul of our nation.

Ghomeshi: What are the songs, the Lightfoot songs, that you want to remain as your legacy, the ones most closely identified with you?

Lightfoot: Well, there’s, I mean, that’s kind of a weird question to answer about yourself. I guess, you know, If you could read my mind, and Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, but not so much Sundown, you know, because it’s such a seedy, back alley type of song, from a pretty low time in my life.

————————

Ghomeshi: You are a legend

Sasquatch: uhh, yeah. obviously. What - that was a really stupid thing to say. Like- “you are a radio host.” 

Ghomeshi: So, do you think that there is a unique Canadian Songwriting identity?

Sasquatch: Yes, definitely, there is a unique Canadian songwriting identity

. 

Ghomeshi: Why do you think that is?

Sasquatch: Well i think it’s because Canada supports the world’s largest remaining Sasquatch population, you know, and also Boreal forests, and the largest surviving wolf and bison populations as well, so it’s only natural that that would run in the soul of our nation. 

Ghomeshi: Anything to do with Celtic populations?

Sasquatch: Oh geez… (laughs), well, Canada certainly has a rich and diverse cultural, uhhh, makeup, and a very interesting history… but as you know, many great songwriters are alcoholics, and one of the cheapest and most common beers in Canada has a picture of a sasquatch on the can, and so, you know, probably a lot of great songwriters had that in their hands, and consequently in their minds, at key moments.

Ghomeshi: So nothing to do with Celtic populations, specifically.

Sasquatch: I got no comment there.

Ghomeshi: What are the songs, the Lightfoot songs, that you want to remain as your legacy, the ones most closely identified with you?

Sasquatch: Wow, that’s a hard question to answer. I love Lightfoot! I guess, gheeze, I gotta say that tune Sundown, you know, because it really… well, you know, I’m not as young as I once was, but every time I hear Sundown, it just puts me in mind of my old Girlfriend, Gloria, and these long, endless sunsets we have in the Canadian north in the summer, and watching the sunsets with her. God, we were so young, and she had such hairy legs, she was so sexy… I think of her whenever i hear that song. 

It is late summer but it does not yet smell like fall. No autumnal breezes wafting, but here in Yukon on the sixth of August we can feel autumn, as surely as we can feel spring on a cold cold day in March, still under four feet of snow. 

Late summer is not revealing itself so overtly in the forest. No, the forest is instead becoming more regal. More stately. Each tree is proudly luxuriating over this year’s few millimeters of height gained. The forest is quieter. Mosquitoes are on the wane, and the birds, having done most of their reproductive work, are enjoying the company of their spouse in this year’s fine nest before it’s time to move. The forest is like a Queen in the late period of her rein: seasoned, supremely confident, needing no words to express her power.

Late summer is showing itself in the garden. Everything is rusty, and there are raspberries, and the annual flowers are wishing they lived somewhere else. Even the dandelions are looking rusty in their leaves, and every plant that bears fruit is expressing itself fully, its seeds presenting themselves to us animals in the final act of botanical reproduction: “Eat Me, scatter my seeds.”

But I  not a plant. Iam an animal,  am more like a beaver, or a bear, and I am facing hibernation. In fact, I am facing my most magnificent hibernation yet, a hibernation which will end in March, with a dramatic calving season, and a new leggy colt. I am very pleased to be in sync with the deer, actually all wild fur-bearers, on this one. Spring is the time for babies.

I have been trying to explain to the cats that I am pregnant, that is, with child, or ‘there is going to be a litter,’ or ‘I’m going to have a human-cub.’ Inter-species communication, difficult at the best of times, is really breaking down on this one. Too Conceptual? Cat gestation periods are nine weeks. These are the responses I seem to be getting from the cats. 

Hilde to Pony: “Pony, I’m going to have a baby.”

Pony: ” Mmm hmm. Let’s snuggle.”

Hilde to Pony: “Do you get it? A baby. You’ve always been my baby Are you worried? Jealous? Are you ready to be a big sister”

Pony: “Hmm hmm hmmm……”

Hilde to Gretchen: “Gretchen, I’m going to have a baby.”

Gretchen: “You know Hilde, I don’t actually live in this reality.”

Hilde: “This is pretty important to me. I’m going to have a baby.”

Gretchen: “Listen, I think you’ve known for some time that I only barely live in this reality, because I have a mission to show passionate love to you and John. Let me show you love. Feast your eyes on the exquisite fur of my stomach”

Hilde: “So the baby….”

Gretchen: “This communication is over.”

Writing this down has been very illuminating. Time to enjoy late summer. Time to eat fruits and fatten up. Time to look forward hibernation’s best activity: sharing body heat with the mammals you love to love best. 

In Which I Interview Jordan Schmidt. 

Interview remixed most extensively by Angel Hall.

Discussed: 

Folk Music

Magical Creatures.

Things (and persons) Mercurial.

Finally, at long last, we have my post-show interview from the incredible debut of Whitehorse all-female metal band Carnal Romance.

The show kicked ass. Shock waves continue to reverberate throughout the community. Audience members profess to having been both frightened and aroused. We were back in the coat check room and got the raw, straight goods from three out of four band members.

Thanks to Angel Bootstrap as always for producing the audio. 

This has taken so long to get up because I’ve been looking for photos of the show- the visual experience was not to be missed. I never managed to locate any (but the group Does Remember posing for a photo! So if you’re that shooter, please share!) Happily, I did manage to get a little re-enactment action this past weekend, so all you fan-boys out there don’t have to suffer disappointed. 

Just, for God’s Sake! Go to the next show!