The Death of a Much Travelled Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

escaped.
    “Don’t say Peckham in public,” I warned her. “Anyway, it was East Dulwich. But now I’ve moved. My bassoonist friend Nicola has offered me an attic room in the house she shares in Hampstead.”
    But Dee wasn’t really listening. “Do you think I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life explaining to people that Canada is not a state of America? It even happened when the fair was held in Montreal. Felicity is fucking English—didn’t she learn any geography?”
    “Probably not in ballet school or wherever she went,” I comforted Dee. “Can you leave your stand or should I get some food and bring it back?”
    “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “The public doesn’t come ’til two. I’m going to need all my strength to deal with the Rooskies.”
    “Has it been hard getting here?” I said. “These things are so easy for me. I just fly in and out.”
    “It gets harder every year to leave Vancouver,” Dee said. “I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a jet-setting feminist.”
    “What? And miss out on all the gossip?” We went past the British women’s presses, and I waved to a friend of mine at Sheba. “That’s what these things are really about. Remember a few years ago?”
    Dee’s blue eyes began to sparkle. “The showdown between the Northern and Southern hemispherists?”
    “Or Oslo?”
    “It stayed light too late was the problem. It went to people’s heads.”
    We laughed. “What about this year?” I asked. “Heard anything scandalous yet?”
    Dee thought. “Well. You-know-who is here from Germany again…and…Oh, I know. Lulu Britten’s got a stand.”
    “Lulu Britten?”
    “The editor of Trash Out .”
    “Oh, really,” I said. “That should provoke a few fireworks.”
    As an American expatriate, I was usually a little behind the times, but even I’d heard of the New York-based Trash Out: A Journal for Contentious Feminists . It was a forty-page monthly, stapled, on newsprint, with a glossy cover usually featuring someone in the women’s community. Gloria, Rita Mae, Lily, Martina had been among the faces to appear on the cover. Inside was a lengthy (negative) assessment of their writing, performance, and lifestyle, spiced with innuendo and rude remarks from unnamed sources. CIA connections, drinking and drug bouts, hysterical displays of temper, peculiar sexual tastes, and, most of all, the hypocrisy of their moral public pronouncements contrasted with their sordid personal lives. It was hot and it was nasty. But that wasn’t all.
    In addition to the “profiles” of infamous feminists, Trash Out also offered blow-by-blow accounts of women’s conferences rather in the manner of off our backs . The difference was that Trash Out rarely reported what went on during the panels and plenaries, instead giving the full treatment to cruel remarks and furious behind-the-scenes dissension. The journal also had a lengthy review section where critics slandered and dismissed feminist authors, musicians, and artists.
    Feminism is in many ways a literary movement, so it wasn’t surprising that Trash Out concentrated on well-known authors, nor that it had been able to exploit a market hungry for the low-down on mentors who had gotten too famous. The journal gave a voice to critics who were tired of being forced to at least appear to be giving a balanced assessment of writers’ work and allowed the personal life of the writer to come in for as much dirt as possible. Yet the profiles, conference reports, and reviews were only part of Trash Out ’s appeal. Many of its readers couldn’t have cared less why such and such famous authors fell out, or why a certain author was no longer publishing with a certain press. What the average reader looked forward to every month was the letters section where any feminist could write and complain about her sisters.
    Once we had “criticism/self-criticism,” the Maoist-inspired exchange that used to come at the end of bruising