Women in Sport: ‘Fuck You, Bobby Fischer: The Emotional Labour of Playing Chess as a Woman’, by Katerina Bryant

Illustrations by Michelle Baginski.

This essay is the second in a week-long series of commentary pieces that explore women’s experience in sporting culture.


The English Opening

Writing this down for the first time, it feels like a middle class origin story. I’m five years old, sitting in the ‘library’ of my parents’ home. It’s not a large room; books overflow from the shelves. Mum sits across from me, showing how the pieces move. A knight gallops in an L-shape; one, two, turn-the-corner. This is not something she had expected to show her child – the chess set in the corner of the room is ornamental but the glimmering brass pieces on the leather board have caught my attention, and I’m fixated.

Over the next two years, I play mum regularly. I begin to beat her. Then, it’s dad’s turn. He taught mum over the same board I learnt on, one night soon after they were married. I would be born in seven years. He’s a more cautious player than mum, he protects his pieces while she jettisons them forward on a whim. Much quicker now, I begin beating dad too. By this time, I was in year two and had joined the school chess club. I was the only girl in early education who could play and a ‘big girl’ would accompany me to the computer room every Friday. I was amazed by the mounds of pieces, the sound of them crashing as girls emptied them hurriedly from plastic boxes. I’d never had so many people to play, so many moves to make. It was endless.

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Women in Sport: ‘The Physical is Feminine’, by Brunette Lenkić

Daily News (Perth), 14 Apr 1950.

This essay is the first in a week-long series of commentary pieces that explore women’s experience in sporting culture.

Active women can change the world. And that might be why, over the centuries, they have been strapped into corsets, bustles and stilettos, or had their feet bound, necks extended and genitals mutilated. Such physical constraints in the name of fashion or religion suggest at a deeper level that if women weren’t tethered, they might escape. It has been a continuing challenge for girls and women to be allowed to run, jump, throw, catch, hit, chase, form teams and compete freely. Some of the obstacles that constrict female roles in wider society are particularly visible in the sporting arena because sport poses the question: what are bodies for?

In Mussolini’s Italy of the 1930s, the sporting woman was regarded with such suspicion that the government supported a Vatican line and banned “unwomanly athletics.” These included football, running races and participation in the Olympic Games. According to Mussolini, “Fascist girls must be prepared to discharge the missions of wives and mothers and learn how to rule a household. They may take such exercise as will improve their figures but no more.” The ban was widely reported in newspapers of the day, including in Australia.

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Five Poems by James Brown

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Image by Vern. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.

if you like someone you want to try to touch their genitals

before that though you have to try and figure out a way to
interact with them in such a way that involves lingering for
a bit too long

then they know
and you know

sexual attraction can make you want to have sex with
people that you would be absolutely horrified to produce a
baby with.

remember: finding somebody attractive is just your body’s
way of tricking you into breeding and reproducing more
humans

but it’s still good I think

love thing

i imagined you as an intricate sparkling diamond
surrounded by tendrils of gold threads, infinitesimally
fragmented and glittering

you emerged from a thin golden thread from my chest
and hovered above me

i want to run the tips of my fingers down the entire length
of your back faintly, so you can barely register the sensation

maybe send a gold shiver through your entire body

park

i am sitting in a park and there are businessmen walking past me in black suits, some grey

seems good that all these people walking around in suits doing business meetings like to lick some
people’s
genitals also sometimes

i spent at least 20 seconds visualising making out with a crow while staring at a crow

imagine if you could make birds explode if you stared at them for long enough

there should be a Counting Crows song called: ‘there are five crows’

what if a giant asteroid was on track to completely obliterate the earth but at the last moment it just
came up and kissed it a bit and left

seems weird that people evolved to have to wear clothes

billions of people

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Two Poems by Alison Whittaker

Image by DevonshireMedia. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.

sparse shit poem

Heard you
hurtin’
    Got you
    this
        Sparse
        shit
        poem
            Helpless
            mewling
            at the sting.

            Offered you
            as a salve.
                   Offered us
                   as bad salvation.

Offered back
as stand-in
turbine. heartbeat
‘lectrons for y’nation.

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‘Pink Horror: The Violent Feminine in Nicola Maye Goldberg’s “Other Women”’, by Mikaella Clements

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We know tragic women. The well-loved trope of doomed women, fictional or historical, is both overused and comforting in literature; immediately recognisable, somehow soothing. In Nicola Maye Goldberg’s debut novel Other Women the unnamed narrator nods to the “pantheon of dead girls: Ophelia, Sylvia Plath, Emma Bovary, Laura Palmer, Joan of Arc, Marie Antoinette.” The girls lost to men and violence and history. A long line of women who deserved better. A group of bitter ghosts.

Initially it seems Other Women’s fraught, depressed narrator might join them, but instead, “Sometime shortly after I dropped out,” she explains, “I gave up on being a Sad Girl and got used to being a Sick Girl instead.”

Goldberg’s conception of the ‘Sick Girl’ is one of the most triumphant fuck-yous to the Sad Girl trope I’ve read in years: Fuck you, I’m not sad like a beautiful accessory; Fuck you, it’s not just in my head; Fuck you, it is in my head and that’s a medical issue. Goldberg’s Sick Girl is depressed, anxious, unwell. She practices self-harm. She fantasises about suicide. She goes to see a useless psychiatrist and returns home to practice new forms of self-destruction. Her sickness is undeniably a medical issue, fitting for a heroine interested in anatomy and biology; one interested, particularly, in blood. It wells up again and again, usually as a surprise to the reader but always, in hindsight, obvious, as though blood and its spectre are thrumming along under the narrative.

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Excerpt: ‘Which Treats of Lázaro’s Account of the Friendship He Shared with a Blind Trafficker in Stories and the Misfortunes That Befell Them’, by Carlos Yushimito

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Image by gskx. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License.

Have you ever seen out in the country at midday an electric bulb aglow? I have seen one. It is one of life’s bad memories.

—Juan Emar, Miltín 1934

There was a time when I often gazed at the factory chimneys. Each morning they were the same height and their colour resembled zinzolin, a kind of purple that, lacklustre as it is, blended with the red of daybreak. Those details were important to me: they let me know that between night and day nothing had changed. The rain, for example, had not made one chimney grow taller than the other or effaced or discoloured the enamel. It soothed me to note that the black clouds that rose from the chimneys, though unrelenting, would never darken the rest of the sky; the smoke billowed and it seemed to me that I was watching a giant’s fingers as he twirled his hair.

On those occasions I spent hours waiting for the blind man to wake. Between the white eyes of sleep and the white eyes of waking I learned to distinguish a rift: the sun hastened the contours of the chimneys and shortly after his hands began to shake as if they were drowning in the light; after this, now with his whole body shaking and his eyes rolled back, he groped his way towards where I was watching him and, with a couple of blows to my head, cried:

“Open your eyes, Lázaro! With no energy there’s no voice, and with no voice there’s no appetite…”

And when that happened, the streets were already teeming with the same diligence. The blind man gave the order to go outside and not long after he was crying out, “Have a story told, any story!” He left out nothing that the other traffickers in stories thought to say. People passed by, avoiding his voice; the women, especially, sidestepped him and wrinkled their noses as if they were afraid of getting them wet. But there was always someone who, lured by the words cast by that hoarse and almost violent voice, dropped a coin into our little tin and inclined his or her head to listen more closely. Perhaps owing to his blindness, if the blind man said he remembered, the people believed; and if officials overlooked the fact that he dared spout the lies that came out his mouth, it was because in those times, when stories were forbidden, his were ensconced in the impunity of his useless eyes, which were never taken for anything but harmless and devoid of all authority.

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Come to the 2017 Experimental Non-Fiction Workshop!

ABOUT

In the lead-up to the May 29 submission date for The Lifted Brow & non/fictionLab’s Prize for Experimental Non-fiction, we are running a seminar focusing on the histories and practices of experimental non-fiction writing.

This event is geared towards writers of all levels of experience who are seeking to engage more deeply with the form. It will be led by long-time Brow contributor Rebecca Harkins-Cross.

The event will take place in Melbourne for writers to attend in person.

We will also record the audio of the event – if you are interested in receiving this audio after the event with a PDF of any presentation materials, do email us so we can put you on the list. There will be a small fee for this (waived for subscribers and RMIT students).

The lecture and discussion will give an introductory historical overview of the genre, and will look closely at the work of several contemporary practitioners and how they interpret the form.

We are enthusiastic to meet those already working in this genre, to assist new writers to harness experimental techniques and ideas within their practice, and we welcome those who are simply curious.

DETAILS

When:
Sunday May 21, 2017
9:30am-12:30pm

Where:
RMIT University, Melbourne City Campus
Building 9, Level 2, Room 10A
(Building 9 is on the corner Franklin and Bowen Streets.)

Cost:
Free for The Lifted Brow subscribers and for RMIT students, $15 otherwise. (You can subscribe here.)

Bookings:
Please email [email protected] to reserve your spot. Include in your email your name, a mobile phone number, and know whether you are a subscriber or if you will be paying. (We will let you know how to transfer us the money if you are paying.)

Places are limited, so please book early.

We particularly encourage people who are queer and/or trans, and/or of any race, colour, religion, gender, age, and/or have a disability, to attend — and to that end, we have reserved some free places in the workshop for writers with diverse identities. Please just let us know. Additionally, if you are experiencing any kind of hardship, financial or otherwise, contact us and we’ll do what we can to accommodate you.

Contact:
Please direct all queries to [email protected].

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‘Inheriting Colombo’, by Fiona Wright

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Image by Philippe Arpels. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.

Pettah

Packets of men’s underwear thrust in my face,
the happy plastic
of inflatable penguins, fat-cheeked dolls.
Spined fish dry on grey tarpaulins,
and piled red leather thongs
   grow stiff and stringy in the sun
   like the glutinous fried syrup
children chew
on long-haul buses.

The crannied streets
   stitch together stagnant roadblocks,
and tall and terraced houses
   lean backwards from the throng.
A sudden temple flexes.
Its sculpted walls
a mad and teeming mirroring of streets,
the coloured gods bloody and riotous,
   vengeful as memory.

Fruit sellers hang their washing, disembowelled
   from razor wire
and dice pineapple
for hungry students.

I can smell war in this city.
   The khaki jeeps creep through the bus queues.
A thin-fingered soldier
   invites me to hold his rifle,
and calls me beautiful.

Albino

At a food stall,
   eating beetroot curry with pink fingers
   he saw his first albino,

a small child,
   eyebrows like the down
in the centre of a coconut.

She hid her face
   from the sunburnt soldiers,
buried deep in her father’s dark knees.

At a bus stop, I see albino skin
   prickling pinker in the heat,
the sun griddling through earlobes;

fingertips in a lacery of veins.
   In the pulse and spill of people
women clutch thick-skinned umbrellas

And his pale limbs arrest my eyes.
   He startles when he sees me,
then his grin thins, and turns away.

Pink eyes.
We both are skinless
   in these streets.

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‘Young Adults of the Corn: A Review of John Darnielle’s ”Universal Harvester”’, by Matthew Hickey

“People shoot movies on soundstages that they try to make look like Nevada,” writes John Darnielle early in his second novel, Universal Harvester. They mostly fail in their efforts, though, unable to recreate the odd sense of claustrophobia that arises from rural sprawl, with cornfields that “flicker against the window like stock footage” as characters commute along quiet highways. Of course it’s not just the atmosphere they miss about a place like Nevada (Ne-vay-dah – the town in Iowa, not the state to its west) but the inhabitants, the people who are born, live and die happily there. In studio films, the kind that can afford soundstages, a small town is less a setting than a symbol, and its population—those who are ‘trapped’ or ‘left behind’, etc.—ciphers in service to this symbolism. It’s a motif not lost on twenty-something video store clerk Jeremy Heldt, who spends his days cataloguing and rewinding movies. His hometown is simply fodder for reflection and backstory, where characters “complain about how awful it was there, or, later, to remember it as a place of infinite promise.”

Jeremy lives alone with his father, having lost his mother in a car accident six years earlier. The two of them usually eat dinner together and watch a movie afterwards – middling, then-recent blockbusters like Reindeer Games (this part of the novel is set in the nineties). Jeremy considers himself “a little more high-minded than his dad, but they both disappeared into the screen’s glow at about the same time.” The television, the great equalising force of popular culture, so often portrayed as an insidious, homogenising force, is here recast as a unifying activity, a way for characters to bond and relate to each other.

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We’re Looking for Non-Fiction for the 35th Issue of Our Print Magazine!

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Do you write non-fiction? Would you like to be published in the 35th issue of our flagship quarterly attack journal, The Lifted Brow? If so, we have some news for you: we’re looking for completed non-fiction pieces to publish in TLB #35!

Our 35th issue of The Lifted Brow is unthemed, but we’re always and forever most interested in writing that focuses on the arts, culture, gender/race/sexuality, ecology, economics, politics, work, and the like.

We encourage writers from all backgrounds to approach their non-fiction submissions boldly, deeply, and/or experimentally. Think big or small, but whatever you think, make sure it’s in keeping with what the we tend to publish (check out our latest issues or subscribe to best understand the work we like best).

While an Australian focus will be favoured, as we are an Australian-based publication that is facing out to the world, we’re open to anything from everywhere about everything.

We will look fondly upon:

  • lyric and personal essays;
  • narrative nonfiction and highly researched, investigative stories;
  • comment pieces that blend the personal with the universal;
  • long essays;
  • playful theory;
  • environmental, science and technology writing with a human and/or political element;
  • memoir and other life writing;
  • collected vignettes;
  • and pieces that are perhaps uncategorisable, and that make imaginative use of the printed page.

Complete drafts of all submissions must be sent through by midnight Sunday 28 May, 2017. At this stage we are not looking for pitches for non-fiction work, but complete pieces.

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