Now here’s a comment I just can’t let hang out there:
Despite the “progress” in decreasing the glass ceiling of wage gaps, educational attainment, fertility control, improvements in technological changes in domestic appliances, and more freedom in the market sphere, women are not any happier. Instead, career-women, failing marriages, neglected children, unkempt homes and general unhappiness are the hallmarks of feminism. [Zeal for Truth ????!!!!]
Well roll on the miserable floor, I just had to come up with something to counter that howling piece of miscreancy. And here it is, just in time, from BarbaraEhrenreich via Tom Englehardt:
Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.
On Slate’s DoubleX website, a columnist concluded from the study that “the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women’s complaints disguised as manifestos… and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act — in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs.” Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it, more soberly: “[T]he feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach… [S]elf-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.”
But it’s a little too soon to blame Gloria Steinem for our dependence on SSRIs. For all the high-level head-scratching induced by the Stevenson and Wolfers study, hardly anyone has pointed out (1) that there are some issues with happiness studies in general, (2) that there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular, or (3) that, even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone’s mood. [more]
Ehrenreich’s latest book is out – Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America at amazon.ca
Here’s Ehrenreich interviewed by John Allemang at the Globe & Mail, more stuff at The Situationisthereand a half-hour audio discussion at Talk of the Nation here
An online version of all 902 letters to and from Vincent Van Gogh, including sketches, annotations, transcriptions and translations is available at Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters. The website contains
all the known letters from and to Vincent van Gogh based on a close examination of the manuscripts and supplemented with explanatory notes. The text is presented in the original language and spelling, as well as in an English translation … we have tried to add all the information to the letters that present and future generations might need in order to understand what Van Gogh and his correspondents mean and to what they are referring. This mainly concerns the identification of individuals, of works of art by Van Gogh and other artists, of books and magazines. Wherever possible we identify the origin of allusions to (explicit or otherwise) or quotations from novels and poems, the Bible, publications of art criticism or art history, and other reading matter like newspapers and periodicals. Contemporary circumstances and events relating to biographies, cultural history and art history are also explained. These were either known or self-evident to the correspondents, but outsiders lacked the background to understand them – and that certainly applies to readers more than a century later. All this information is contained in the annotations to the letters. In addition, the lengthy study of the manuscripts and the literally countless investigations conducted in the most varied fields for the annotations, yielded more general insights. These are presented in this introduction. They also relate to the subjects discussed in the letters, to the historical context in which they were written, and the circles in which Van Gogh moved. As such they supplement the annotations, but adopt a wider perspective. However, it is not just a question of the referentiality of the letters. One can also detect patterns and tendencies in Van Gogh’s way of writing and in his treatment of the manuscripts and texts as letters. Attention is drawn here to the most important of these. [Van Gogh as a letter writer]
Based on a similar map of St Petersburg by Vera Evstafieva and Andrew Biliter (**), this one places city-relevant quotes on a San Francisco map, where possible on the district the quote relates to. San Francisco Bay, cable cars, the Mission, the Tenderloin District and Chinatown are all name-checked in this map, which quotes following authors:
Alice Adams (Second Chances – 1988)
Isabel Allende (Daughter of Fortune – 1999)
Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – 1969)
Gertrude Atherton (The House of Lee – 1940)
Albert Benard de Russailh (Last Adventure – 1851)
Ambrose Bierce (The Death of Halpin Frayser – 1891)
Herb Caen (Herb Caen’s San Francisco – 1957)
Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – 1968)
Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – 2000)
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Dog – 1958)
Allen Ginsberg (Sunflower Sutra – 1956)
Andrew Sean Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli – 2004)
Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon – 1930)
Robert Hass (Bookbuying in the Tenderloin – 1967)
Bob Kaufman (No More Jazz at Alcatraz)
Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men – 1980)
Jack Kerouac (On the Road – 1957)
Gus Lee (China Boy – 1991)
Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City – 1978)
Czeslaw Milosz (Visions From San Francisco Bay – 1975)
Alejandro Murguia (The Medicine of Memory – 2002)
Frank Norris (McTeague – 1899)
Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49 – 1968)
Ishmael Reed (Earthquake Blues – 1988)
William Saroyan (The Living and the Dead – 1936)
John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley – 1961)
George Sterling (The Cool, Grey City of Love – 1920)
Robert Louis Stevenson (Arriving in San Francisco – 1879)
Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club – 1989)
Michelle Tea (Valencia – 2000)
Hunter S. Thompson (The Great Shark Hunt – 1964)
Mark Twain (Early Rising, As Regards Excursions to the Cliff House – 1864)
I haven’t been posting much lately. I’m thinking. The world is spinning inside my head. I’m thinking Chris Hedges is right:
A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies. And we are dying now. We will either wake from our state of induced childishness, one where trivia and gossip pass for news and information, one where our goal is not justice but an elusive and unattainable happiness, to confront the stark limitations before us, or we will continue our headlong retreat into fantasy. [more]
I haven’t retreated into fantasy but I’m less and less sure of how to talk about illusions of reality. I’m thinking.
Considering the literary canon of Lesbian writers, perhaps none have had the pervasive impact and influence of poet Adrienne Rich, who entered the scene early, but continued to learn and evolve as she gained recognition and accolades for her modulated, angry, confrontational, articulate, yet subtle verse. Not that Rich only addressed defiant feminist gender politics. Much of her poetry has a reflective, wistful feel about it. No one (who gave it much thought) would accuse her of monotony or polemics. Married to Harvard economist Alfred H. Conrad in 1953, they had three sons before the epiphany of her actual orientation was fully realized, the territory of her writing symbiotic with her journey of self-discovery.
A pretty good summary of Rich’s poetic career follows here.
I am very saddened by the suicide of poet Deborah Digges. Her book on a journey with her difficult teenaged son is one of the most courageous pieces of writing I know of – only just slightly less courageous than the journey itself. It gave me hope when I had little faith in my own much critisized mothering.
In recognizing Digges’ death, Edward Byrne posted this, written by Digges, on his blog, One Poet’s Notes:
“Once I asked myself, when was I happy?
I was looking at a February sky.
When did the light hold me and I didn’t struggle?”
Today @The Guardian you can find a lovely slideshow of illustrations from classic children’s literature as published in the Walker Illustrated Classics Series. Here’s one by Paul Howard from Classic Poetry:
‘The idea of illustrating classic poetry terrified me at first – I can’t remember jokes let alone poems from my school days and consequently think of myself as a ‘poetus ignoramus’. To my great surprise this worked in my favour and I found myself embarking on a fantastic voyage of discovery. I lived and breathed poetry for months, collecting many images of each poet. I wanted the portraits to reflect the period in which the poets lived, and countless visits to museums and libraries and a mountain of research lies behind the pictures … ‘ Paul Howard
From a review of Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde by Pam Rosenthal:
How did a perpetually frightened and insecure young woman summon up such powers of illusion? Out of what fathomless need did an illegitimate child who spent years in foster homes command so much attention and so much love, even 40 years after her death? How, out of a series of doomed affairs and marriages and some not-very-good scripts, did she manage to tell us so much about sex? And what kept her from ever satisfying her own needs for love and respect?
Oates presents her story as a tale of the grotesque, a horror story akin to Stephen King’s “Carrie,” another book about an unhappy child with a mad mother. Like most horror stories, “Blonde” is a tale of freakish overcompensation, impossible wishes granted, awesome power ill-used, demons finally undefeated — the story of an injured child who can’t be healed, even by the love of the millions. There’s nothing supernatural in it, of course, unless you consider the immense sway that movie images and technology hold over all our imaginations.
Unlike genre horror fiction, though, “Blonde” is a huge, incantatory, expressionistic work that doubles back on itself to retell stories again and again, building its themes and variations through a seeming infinity of retakes. Description approaches hallucination. The action is told by numerous voices, some singular and famous, some anonymous and plural. Sometimes the narrative voice is breathless, almost gasping — the ghostly Marilyn Monroe voice, oddly formal and well mannered, too high and thin for the body that produced it.
There is a lot here about how poetry comes into being. Speaking of Robert Lowell’s “epoch-making poems like ‘For the Union Dead’ and ‘Near the Ocean,’ Heaney explains: “They came from where he was cornered, in himself and his times, and were the equivalent of escapes, surges of inner life vaulting up and away. Every true poem arrives like that, with self-consciousness giving way to self-forgetfulness in the glee of finding the words.” An aside on Lorca finds him making the same point in other terms, finding in the Spanish poet’s essay on duende an implication “that poetry requires an inner flamenco, that it must be excited into life by something peremptory, some initial strum or throb that gets you started and drives you farther than you realized you could go.” “The image I have,” he writes later, “is from the old cartoons: Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse coming hell for leather to the edge of a cliff, skidding to a stop but unable to halt, and shooting out over the edge. A good poem is the same, it goes that bit further and leaves you walking on air.”
One striking example comes in his discussion of the famous lines from his early poem “Digging.” Heaney explains: “In the case of the pen ‘between my finger and my thumb’, ‘snug as a gun’, and all the rest of it, I was responding to an entirely phonetic prompt, a kind of sonic chain dictated by the inner ear. It’s the connection between the ‘uh’ sounds in ‘thumb’ and ‘snug’ and ‘gun’ that are the heart of the poetic matter rather than any sociological or literary formation.” That aural susceptibility is everywhere on display in this book, as when he comments: “I always hear the tinkle of a whitesmith’s hammer in the word ‘tinker’, the rim of a tin can being beaten trim”—or when he speaks of “poems full of linguistic burr and clinker.” (“If I couldn’t altogether escape an Irishy/Britishy formality,” he comments, “I had an inclination from the start to dishevel it. I’ve always been subject to a perverse urge to galumph rather than glide.”)
Anything that can be thoroughly said in prose might as well be said in prose. The everyday intellect remains satisfied with abstraction and explanation in prose; the poetic mentality wants more. In narrative poems, the poetry adds the secret (unsayable) room of feeling and tone to the sayable story. Philosophy in its more logical incarnations strives to eliminate powers of association because they are subjective and uncontrollable. Poetry, on the other hand, wants to address the whole matter of the human — including fact and logic, but also the body with its senses, and above all the harsh and soft complexities of emotion. Our senses, excited by sound and picture, assimilate records of feeling that are also passages to feeling. Poems tell stories; poems recount ideas; but poems embody feeling. Because emotion is il-logical—in logic opposites cannot both be true; in the life of feeling, we love and hate together—the poem exists to say the unsayable.
all the known letters from and to Vincent van Gogh based on a close examination of the manuscripts and supplemented with explanatory notes. The text is presented in the original language and spelling, as well as in an English translation … we have tried to add all the information to the letters that present and future generations might need in order to understand what Van Gogh and his correspondents mean and to what they are referring. This mainly concerns the identification of individuals, of works of art by Van Gogh and other artists, of books and magazines. Wherever possible we identify the origin of allusions to (explicit or otherwise) or quotations from novels and poems, the Bible, publications of art criticism or art history, and other reading matter like newspapers and periodicals. Contemporary circumstances and events relating to biographies, cultural history and art history are also explained. These were either known or self-evident to the correspondents, but outsiders lacked the background to understand them – and that certainly applies to readers more than a century later. 
Considering the literary canon of Lesbian writers, perhaps none have had the pervasive impact and influence of poet Adrienne Rich, who entered the scene early, but continued to learn and evolve as she gained recognition and accolades for her modulated, angry, confrontational, articulate, yet subtle verse. Not that Rich only addressed defiant feminist gender politics. Much of her poetry has a reflective, wistful feel about it. No one (who gave it much thought) would accuse her of monotony or polemics. Married to Harvard economist Alfred H. Conrad in 1953, they had three sons before the epiphany of her actual orientation was fully realized, the territory of her writing symbiotic with her journey of self-discovery.
How did a perpetually frightened and insecure young woman summon up such powers of illusion? Out of what fathomless need did an illegitimate child who spent years in foster homes command so much attention and so much love, even 40 years after her death? How, out of a series of doomed affairs and marriages and some not-very-good scripts, did she manage to tell us so much about sex? And what kept her from ever satisfying her own needs for love and respect?