Let’s end with a quote (this is from memory, so it’s likely paraphrased):

“Biting is excellent! It’s like kissing, only there’s a winner!”

Makes me want to be a biting madwoman.

Dear Lefty,

Please allow me to comment on a major failing of the U.S. Left: its tendency to rant, froth at the mouth, proclaim the end of the world, panic, and generally drown folks in jargon. Activists who talk that way are often seen, and not unreasonably, as deranged.

“But the world’s going to hell in a handbasket!” you might reply. “People have to listen!”

Nope. You have to learn how to communicate.

Until then you are, in effect, building a concrete wall between your issue and the people who might otherwise get involved. You know — those people you call “apolitical.”

Here’s a book to start with. It’s a practical guide for parents: How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. Or you could just read the title and take it to heart. Try not to blow off the second part of that title, the “listening” part.

Here’s a picture of its gorgeous cover, complete with a link to the book on Powell’s. (But if you decide to order it, go to powellsunion instead (type in powellsunion.com or http://www.ilwulocal5.com/support) , because then the union gets cred and a bit of cash.)

Yours truly,

SnarkyLeftyGirl

Inanna

She’s a major god in the Sumerian pantheon, a direct descendant of Nannu, the primeval mother of heaven and earth. She was worshipped for thousands of years and bears a strong resemblance to other lands’ goddesses, such as Ishtar, Aprhodite, and Venus. Sumerians sang many hymns and told many stories about her.

Enheduanna, the first person ever to sign her name to a work of writing, prayed to Inanna as her personal god.

Inanna is the one who first brought civilization to the people. Sumerians tell of the divine me’s — no translation is possible because they’re laws, events, and qualities; for instance: irrigation, the flood, suffering, joy. Once upon a time, Enki had all the me’s, and Inanna, his daughter, journeyed to visit him. They drank a lot, and then he gave her all the me’s. He later regretted it and sent minions after her to retrieve them, but too late!

In another story, Inanna journeys to the underworld, just because she can. Her sister, who rules the underworld, has her stripped naked and killed, but she gets out again with the help of her faithful assistant. But the underworld demanded somebody in her place, and that somebody turned out to be her faithless husband Dumuzi.

Nanshe
Nanshe is the goddess who looks out for widows, orphans, beggars, the debt-slave — the socially disenfranchised. She’s in charge of making sure that weights and measures are fair and accurate. And boy, does she run her temple like a tight ship. For instance, her temple hymns say:

“If the grain does not suffice for these rites and the vessels are empty and do not pour water, the person in charge of the regular offerings does not receive extra.”

I should think not!

The hymns also specify that priests can be fired or denied rations if they step out of line. People who ate and say they didn’t are also in trouble, as are mothers who deny food to their children.

She’s a powerful goddess, Nanshe, who “cares for all the countries,” who delivers the powerful to the powerless, who “sees into the heart of the Land as if it were a split reed.”

If You Had to Choose
Sumerians worshipped the entire pantheon, but they had one god in particular as their personal god. If you had to choose between these two, which would you serve? This question has special significance to me right now, because with everything going on in Libya, in Wisconsin, etc., it seems like right now is the time for some good social justice action — but what my soul craves is a long bath in the sea of story. I haven’t been writing stories in a year or more, and the lack is painful. Can I do both?

More Goddessy Goodness

For the authentic best-guess translations of Sumerian texts, check out the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature. That’s where I snagged the quotes about Nanshe (A hymn to Nanshe: translation).

Nanshe, along with Inanna, also appears in Enheduanna’s temple hymns. There’s a lovely PDF of some of the hymns here.

I first met Enheduanna in the book Humming the Blues: Inspired by Nin-Me-Sar-Ra, Enheduanna’s Song to Inanna by Cass Dalglish.

The best place for a retelling of Inanna’s stories is the book Inanna by Kim Echlin and Linda Wofsgruber. It made me want to cry for poor Dumuzi, and for Inanna, who apparently regretted banishing him to the underworld. The somewhat stilted language of the “authentic” translation is made more accessible in this retelling, and the poetic spareness lets the beauty of the story shine through.

Previous Post: Enheduanna and Gilgamesh

But I had absolutely no idea of how much Sumerian literature survives, nor the extent to which goddesses figured in Sumerian story, myth, and poem. And I also did not know that the first person ever to sign her name to a text was a woman.

Her name was Enheduanna. Her father, Sargon, came to Sumer from the nearby country of Akkadia, and conquered the city-states that had previously been warring. He appointed Enheduanna as high priestess. She collected all the temple hymns from all the city-states in one place. At the end of it, she wrote:

“The compiler of the tablets was En-edu-ana. My king, something has been created that no one has created before.”

I get chills when I read that.

I first learned about Enheduanna a year or so back I went to a reading by Cass Dalglish, who wrote Humming the Blues: Inspired by Nin-Me-Sar-Ra, Enheduanna’s Song to Inanna.. It’s a “jazz translation” rather than a literal one, which makes the text come alive with passion and music. Dalglish points out that most translations of the cuneiform fix a single meaning to the words, but multiple readings are possible. So for each line, she took all the possible readings and then wrote a verse of poetry.

Having read Humming the Blues, I couldn’t help but wonder: what does the more traditional translation look like? I wanted the “authentic,” “authoritative” reading of the text. But I wanted the impossible. Sumer vanished with the birth of the Babylonian empire, and what’s left of their culture comes to us in stories passed on to other peoples and fragments of broken clay tablets.

I also couldn’t help but wonder: when did Enheduanna live, relative to the epic of Gilgamesh?

And so I began a journey into the heart of Sumer.

In the next post, I’ll write about Inanna and Nanshe — the goddess of writing and the goddess of social justice.

Governments taking up arms against their citizenry.

We’re in the midst of social change, and the reports are coming instantly.
One Facebook, three blogs, one set of forums, two email accounts, one wiki, one blog reader.

Ten books about Sumer.

Kids off school for the week and myself not writing, to say any of what I am thinking about any of this.
Information overload, and I am not alone in that. It’s hard to write online thoughtfully and especially hard to give the online written word the sustained attention it needs.

On top of this, I have commenced my second weight loss attempt through Weight-Watchers, which I expect to be successful, but which I bitterly resent, especially having recently read somewhere that at any given moment, thirty percent of women are dieting.

For most of human history, though, and in most places in the world, the main struggle for humanity has been to get enough food in our bellies.

Which brings us back to Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Full circle.

My forays into online forums have been super-disappointing. People get tetchy about all sorts of things, and respond in an annoyed way, and next thing you know you have a flame war going. Even worse is that the only posts that seem to get attention are the ones where somebody is fighting. The ones where interesting questions get posed seem to die an early death.

Where, oh where, is the serious, thoughtful, polite discussion?

We totally need an Emily Post for online conversations. Weigh in, folks, what are some good online manners?

Especially manners that encourage online conversation – say what to do instead of what not to do. (As a side note, I read and respond to comments to this blog even if they’re a week late, or a year, or whatever.)

One of my favorites is Kloncke’s guidelines for dhammic posting, which she gave when she guest-posted at Feministe.

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2010/06/21/dhamma-comments-an-experiment/

The feministe comments are decent but IMO something is missing . . . tone, maybe?

http://www.feministe.us/blog/comments/

Here’s another comment policy from a fave blog, Zero at the Bone. I like the “be respectful” part and the “be nice” part.

http://zeroatthebone.wordpress.com/comment-policy/

There’s a bit about tone right here. Like the bit about “nobody can read your facial expression online.”

http://lifehacker.com/#!126654/special-lifehackers-guide-to-weblog-comments

One other gripe: conversations that die just as they get interesting. It seems like conversations often have a life span of a day or two. What’s up with that???

Our most recent book group meeting was pretty unfortunate. I actually read the book – in fact, I spent weeks struggling through it. But my kid vomited that morning, my spouse was working overtime, and on top of that, we were expecting house guests. So I didn’t go, and neither did one of the other four – which left two people, one who had read the book and one who had only gotten part of the way through.

The two things we need, if book group is to keep going, is: 1) more serious members; and 2) one or more people to enforce our rules. I don’t want to be a rule-enforcer. Too burned out by life generally.

Am I really a book group person? I’m not sure. I wouldn’t be in book group if the selection of books, generally speaking, wasn’t so fabulous. I get exposed to books I would never otherwise read, like The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Affinity, and What is the What?

Here’s our list for the past three years:

2010-2011
> 1. other voices, other rooms – truman capote (august 3)
> 2. south of broad – pat conroy
> 3. affinity – sarah waters
> 4. tam lin – pamela dean
> 5. the housekeeper & the professor – yoko ogawa
> 6. logicomix: epic search for truth – apostolos doxiadis
> 7. the forgotten garden – kate morton
> 8. brick lane – monica ali

2009-2010
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
Jamie Ford, Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Gwyneth Jones, Life: a novel
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time
May Sarton, A House By the Sea

List 2008-2009
June 17, 2008
Animal, vegetable, miracle : a year of food life
Kingsolver, Barbara

July 29, 2008
What is the what : the autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng : a novel
Eggers, Dave

September 9, 2008
The beautiful things that heaven bears
Mengestu, Dinaw

October 21, 2008
Moral disorder : stories
Atwood, Margaret Eleanor

December 2, 2008
Let the Northern Lights erase your name : a novel
Vida, Vendela

January 13, 2009
If on a winter’s night a traveler
Calvino, Italo

February 24, 2009
Cat’s Cradle
Vonnegut, Kurt

April 7, 2009
Oh pure and radiant heart
Millet, Lydia

This year’s wall calendar is Alice in Wonderland, illustrated by Iassen
Ghiuselev. And January’s, with the title “Curiouser and curiouser!” shows Alice taking an Escher-esque fall down the rabbit-hole. What with the Egyptian uprising and my reading of Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, I’d say the calendar was right on.

“I don’t like your calendar,” my daughter said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because she’s falling. When will she stop falling?”

“Oh, I don’t know, she’s just going down the rabbit hole . . . ”

“Yes, but when will she stop falling?”

“Well, when she gets to the bottom, of course.”

“Yes, but when will she get to the bottom?”

“February.”

Well, now it’s February. “Sentence first, verdict afterward.”

Doctor Who: Attack of the Gelt

Even more complicated is my brother’s girlfriend and her children. They’re living together but not married. I don’t know them well enough to call them cousins.

The exact specifics of familial relationships aside, it’s been a great visit so far. We went out to dinner with my dad and my brother’s family, and we’ve spent the morning with my dad’s ex-wife, my stepsister and her husband and kids, opening presents, playing the piano and singing, and drinking coffee. The condominium itself is 3,000 feet, which would be a mansion in Seattle. It feels vast. This afternoon we’ll go visit my dad again, and I’ll spend tomorrow with my brother and his family, and then go home Tuesday.

Airport security was surprisingly easy. I expected to have the family patted down, because no way am I exposing my kids to unnecessary radiation, but we just went through the metal detector and that was that. Is it the same in other airports, I wonder? Is the FAA backing down under pressure? And I wonder what it will be like in the Salt Lake airport. It takes about twenty-four hours or more to take a bus or train to Salt Lake City, but I am seriously considering that for next time.