occasionally, one of you will write me and ask me about the profanity that H~E~R~S~T~O~R~Y is fairly littered with...something to the effect of..."you're such a nice girl under all that/you're a good writer/you give off the wrong impression" etc. well. i love getting mail and comments, even if they contain statements like those. i haven't come up with a satisfactory answer to that whole issue, but it turns out that i don't need to. my favourite comedienne of all time, the notorious CHO did it for me, and she did it flawlessly as she responded to a good southern girl who took issue with her vocabulary. look:
> I think you alienate a lot of
> people who don't like to read
> or hear that kind of language.
That is too bad. You know, I would very much chalk it up to habit, and really not hearing the word as obscene but more like punctuation. When you live on the fringes of polite society, the rules shift, whereas we are not so bound to language. It means less, as we have come to believe that we mean less. It's hard to understand if you never lived where I have, or plunged into the kind of culture that I have immersed myself in. When you don't belong in polite society, what reason have you to be polite? I actually rarely use what is termed as profanity in my day to day speech, but my writing and performance style is different. My voice as a writer comes from an interior dictator, as opposed to an interior decorator. Perhaps if the language I use is bothersome, then the idea that you live in another world where privilege and pride are common things, not something that is feigned and squeezed into like an ill fitting dress is what actually upsets you. But if you hold many of the same opinions I do, is it impossible to accept that someone who speaks differently could still be heard?
and then she goes on to say...
> If this potty-mouth is only
> so much window dressing
> then your messageis being
> drowned out by it.
That would be for the people who are like you, not everyone who reads or listens to my work. I haven't thought of my words like window dressing, because I don't think of anything when I write. I simply think that what flows onto the page is what is supposed to be there, but then that is out of my hands once it is given to the reader. Potty mouth is something of an immature dismissal of my work as an artist and an activist, so that is what I see as foul language.
the whole post is available here. oh margaret, you all-ameican girl...if i were sapphic, i'd have such a crush on you. you, quite simply, rock.