Reg mentioned women, church and music.
Well, and Frances mentioned that I do volunteer at opera.
My mother was the first person to introduce me to opera, even
though it wasn't her thing.
She felt that growing up being a member of the Jehovah's Witness
gang, right, that we should have this knowledge of things
in the world.
But, not be too close to it.
I've been watching opera for years,
and I've decided to attempt writing a book.
It's called Bel Canto Bellum.
And based upon the idea that--
anybody here into opera at all?
Yeah.
All right, a few armpits in the air.
All right.
The thing is I started to notice at a very early age
that if this opera was penned let's
say by somebody whose last name ended in a vowel,
the woman wasn't making it.
She was dead.
It's not over to the fat lady sings,
it's probably Teutonic, right?
It's probably German.
They might give you a break.
But the Catholics wasn't playing that.
So this is one written.
It's called Simply To Die Like A Woman.
And part of it is written for Kurt Kauper's work.
He has a book called Diva Fictions.
And this is the Diva speaks from Palazzo Pitti in Florence,
Italy, which is purportedly where the first opera was
given.
This was going to be titled The Woman Who Killed Puccini.
But I decided to do something else with it.
Sisters-- we all begin and end the same
as pulse ghosting through velvet brocade,
as embellished vowels sliding beneath the Italian face,
as what music could not scour from speech,
as what Baroque could not sculpt into ego and equipoise.
We begin and end in this house of harmonized marble.
Whether it's Mimì's wither and blood cough,
Tosca's leap over the waiting balustrade or Butterfly forever
cocooning as knife.
It is here we are among kindred.
Where all women learn to die.
Death shapes us all into instrument,
into strange hybrid of flute bassoon doomed contours
of wood and taut string of F hold
and pitched and resonant agon until we
are annotated anguish languishing
between calculated hysteria and hush.
We are wombed to carry what men cannot lift.
Women are wombed to un-exist and imbibe the voyeuristic pity
of lookers on.
But no more sisters.
No more.
Tonight as we don the garish throat,
as we ready to mint each blood rush
recitative into gilded glint, I ask that we
defy the scripted wax and wane.
Yes, deny each well-writ ruin that shrouds us in shame,
refuse to acquiesce or be courted by blame.
Let us choose one death to color us all.
Tonight, let it be red.
Let it be razor.
Let it be the ever erupting wrist.
Imagine the curtains part, we step forward into stage light
as a singularity shed of all satin
and dressed only as an unlit star.
Only in the body's clarity at night,
our left hand begins extending to the crowd's whetted hunger
as the blade sounds its silver in our right.
We slowly begin carving vein into grin.
We become violinist.
We become violin.
We, passacaglia, sotto voce, adagio, andante, fine.
And at this moment, when all breath belongs to us,
when every music is but a dark and trembling pool at our feet,
there will be no more pity.
And all will know there is only one truth--
that woman is wombed to weep baptismally.
Is born burning at the flash point of tears.
Is the calibration of fulcrum and balance beam
where the world weighs its suffering.
You want to read another one or should I go?
I'll read another one.