Screams from the Pink Collar Ghetto: literature

I'm currently in Ubud, Bali trying to find my muse. Well I know where she is but it appears that I can only come and see her if I am tied down into a chair, caffeinated to my eyeballs, and have spent at least 8 hours procrastinating.

So this is not really a poem - more of an inspiration. I was looking through my quotes from Goodreads.com and they gave me a list of tag words from the quotes I like which I thought was an interesting meditation on me and what appeals to me.

Below: the poem.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Review of "A Moveable Feast"

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What a gossip Ernest Hemingway was - his character assassination of F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein were amusing but so petty. But the idea of traveling through Europe so cheaply and writing and drinking and knowing fantastic people still inspires. Oh to live on $5 a day and travel from France to Spain.

I'm staying in the ghostly remains of Hemingway's Paris - I am living in a friend of a friend's apartment four houses up from where George Orwell lived in "Down and Out in Paris", I've walked past Hemingway's apartment on 74 rue du Cardinal Lemoine yesterday for a glass of wine, I felt like I saw a pale wan Fitzgerald drive past yesterday... but oh how its changed - touristy restaurants, rowdy british football showing bars, expensive fromageries... but still the allure and the romance remains.

I still feel that Hemingway's descriptions hold up and like American aspiring writers - I too long to live in Paris, write the great American novel, and drink wine and hold forth with likeminded individuals... vive Paris!

View all my reviews

What is a Pink-Collar Ghetto?

Pink Collar Ghetto describes women stuck in certain jobs, mostly low-paying and usually because of their sex. “Pink Collar” denotes historically female jobs like maids, secretaries, waitresses, and nurses. "Ghetto" is where marginalized people are forced to live.

I chose this title for my blog from a book I started to write when I was 22 and working in South Carolina as a bartender (barmaid according to my mother) and a receptionist/ temp. As a feminist, I was worried that I would never break out of the pink-collar ghetto. I read Barbara Kingsolver's book "The Bean Trees" and it inspired me to leave SC and go back to school.

Now I am a feminist humanitarian working on gender-based violence in humanitarian settings. It's been a long way from that pink collar ghetto in South Carolina but I never forget my roots.

Screams from the Pink Collar Ghetto

Sunday, February 09, 2014

Poem from Bali

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Review of "A Moveable Feast"