miscellany

Sep. 12th, 2011 06:54 pm
lotesse: (l'engle_unicorn)
[personal profile] lotesse
bfp's first post in a week-long series at Feministe on Detroit has some wonderful comments appended to it; all sound so familiar to me. Childhood in Michigan, adult life currently divided between Illinois and Indiana, an extended family rooted on both sides in Chicagoland - these places are my home turf, and I love 'em in all their messy brokedownness.

[personal profile] rachelmanija and Sherwood Smith are resisting editorial pressure to straighten out a YA novel and speaking truth to power, right on

The Decade of Magical Thinking, on the 9/11 anniversary and toxic narrative centrality

I had to reread A Room of One's Own this weekend - I know, right? terrible! - and the thing that struck me hardest this time through was how lowered my expectations were. My edition's preface, written in the mid-90s, suggests that the current US equivalent to Woolf's "five hundred a year" would be $37,000. And I believe her, I do, when she says one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes. We are all PROBABLY going to heaven, and Vandyck is, we HOPE, to meet us round the next corner — that is the dubious and qualifying state of mind that beef and prunes at the end of the day’s work breed between them - but it's also so terribly true in my life right now that obviously we cannot have wine and partridges and servants carrying tin dishes on their heads, she said. We cannot have sofas and separate rooms. ‘The amenities,’ she said, quoting from some book or other, ‘will have to wait.'

Date: 2011-09-13 12:04 am (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kore
Yeah, and how the (media) culture encourages that poaching (telling each other stories about watching it on TV - ouch!), and the political machine depends on it to wage war and open divides between citizens. And how it's not just people who died, but Americans (the way dead US soldiers are always mentioned first and carefully tabulated in news reports, contrasted with "hundreds of thousands of Afghanistan and Iraq citizens" - faceless).

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