The Feminist Grandma

Book Review: Good and Mad

 

Good and Mad, the Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, by Rebecca Traister. Simon and Schuster. 2018.

Did you watch Dr. Blasey Ford testify about being sexually assaulted in high school? The moment I saw that long arc of mostly male faces sitting in judgment, I began crying and cursing, yelling "fuckers, bastards, assholes." My rage astonished me. I saw the fear in her face, her rapid shallow breathing, and worse, her anxiety to please, to make sure she didn’t offend or inconvenience anyone. "Will that work for you?" she asked. "If that will be helpful..." she offered. And as her testimony dragged on, in a show trial with a foregone conclusion, I sat furious, and was relieved when her ordeal was over.

Rebecca Traister’s book on the political potential of women’s anger was written at white heat in four months, and released before the toxic farce of the Kavanaugh hearing. But as I read it after the hearing, it rang true.

 

Good and Mad focuses on women’s political fervor following the election of Donald Trump: the 2017 Women’s March, the #MeToo movement, and the explosive growth in women running for office, the great majority of them Democrats. It also gives us history. Traister analyzes the role of women’s anger in the long fight for suffrage, and the racist anger of white suffragists when black men won the franchise first. She discusses the Second Wave women’s movement of the 1960's and 70's, and black women's anger as their leadership  was ignored by both their allies and the media.

Traister, a feminist journalist, has thought long and hard about how white males, 31% of the US population, can rule the rest of us through deep individual alliances and divide and conquer tactics.

        images:Min An at Pexels.com                     steemit.com

 

The alliances were personal.The suffragists were sisters, wives, mothers of the middle and upper class men who ruled and shaped their world. To turn against them took enormous courage, and many of these women paid a steep price for their rebellion. In the second wave of feminism, women in consciousness raising groups understood and began to reject the terms of their marriages, and many marriages did not survive.

 

image:acravan.blogspot.com

The alliances were also professional. During the second wave, newly-hatched feminists, mostly middle class, mostly white, began to succeed professionally in the world shaped by men. Grudgingly or whole-heartedly they accepted the ways of that world: job comes first, family a distant second; sexual harassment is just boys being boys.

In the early 70's, as a single mother and newly-hatched lawyer, I was thrilled to be working at an excellent legal aid program. We were united in our zeal to help the poor and oppressed, and the two male directors were smart, supportive, even nurturing. But I spent my years there feeling guilty - inadequate as a mother, inadequate as a lawyer. When I cobbled together a proposal for part-time duties, the directors said “There’s no such thing as a part-time lawyer.” At an annual retreat, some of the men organized a wet T-shirt contest for the young secretaries. We women lawyers were outraged, but it didn’t matter.

we were young and fighting for justice in the 70's

Despite the media focus on bra burning and glass ceilings, second wave feminism was not merely theater, nor only focused on professional white women. Many of us worked on issues of domestic violence, child care, sexual assault, welfare programs. click  And middle-class white women did not invent feminist activism.

Black women have been a consistent revolutionary force in progressive movements. Over and over they take the lead, and then are shoved aside, by black men, by white women. Unlike the media and many white feminists, Traister recognizes their power, and turns to them for examples of courage, expressions of anger.

She quotes Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Uses of Anger,” about black women responding to racism in the second wave of feminism: “[E]very woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions ... which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy, serving progress and change.”

 

Audre Lorde  image:spelman.edu

 

Traister tells of Shirley Chisolm in 1972 running for the Democratic presidential nomination, ignored by the media, betrayed by McGovern. In public she was cool, but behind closed doors she cried, according to Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who said she was ‘very sensitive, very hurt, and very angry.’

 

Shirley Chisholm image:rockfordha.org

Florynce Kennedy, the flamboyant black feminist lawyer, wasn’t cool in public. When television reporters ignored Chisolm, and tried to calm down Kennedy, she threatened, “The next son of a bitch that touches a woman is going to get kicked in the balls.” I remember Flo Kennedy, who died in 2000. I was thrilled by her speech to a gathering of women law students in 1973. That may be why, when my father and brother mocked me: “Look at the radical feminist cooking breakfast for her baby boy,” I answered angrily, “Somebody’s going to get kicked in the balls,” and they fled the kitchen.

 

image: amazon.com

Congresswoman Maxine Waters is famously angry, and doesn’t hesitate to call for Trump’s impeachment, a call which is quickly distorted by Trump’s supporters into a call for assassination. Not just Trump, not just Fox News, but even Democratic leaders have chastised her. When she encouraged people to harass Trump’s cabinet members wherever they run into them, Chuck Schumer said it was ‘un-American,’ and Nancy Pelosi called it ‘unacceptable.’

 

Maxine Waters  image: huffingtonpost.com

 

Traister says white women rely on black women to express their anger for them. "In some ways, the cultural caricature of neck-snapping, side eye-casting black female censure becomes easily embraceable precisely because it is disconnected from...power, because its relationship to the threat of actual disruption of white male authority can be understood as inherently comical. Black women's relative distance, from both white supremacy and patriarchal advantage, makes it easier...to applaud their toughness, precisely because it is so far removed from being a true threat to white male domination."

This post-Trump uprising of women surely contains unconscious white racism and black rage. But Alicia Garza, a founder of Black Lives Matter, says there never has been a movement that wasn’t messy with internal issues. “The question for us is, are we prepared to be the first movement in history that learns how to work through that anger? To not get rid of it, not suppress it, but learn how to get through it together...”

 

Alicia Garza  image:theguardian.com

 

Traister: “The post-2016 movement offers a chance for many white women to be awakened to the many reasons they should be angry. But...the opportunity is not simply to be angry on their own behalf, but also at the injustices faced by other women...who experience those injustices in part thanks to the very mechanisms that protect and enrich those white women.”

We are at the beginning of a new wave of angry women. Traister is repeatedly asked, ‘Is it a movement, or a moment?’ and she answers: “...[M]ovements are made up of moments, strung out over months, years, decades. They become discernible as movements - are made to look smooth, contiguous, coherent - only after they have made a substantive difference.”

At the 2017 Women’s March, I wore my old buttons from the 1970's. I have been to many marches; they are both tedious and inspiring, exhausting and invigorating. To me, Traister's book brings encouragement, hope, and maybe even a little bit of activist energy. I believe in the generative power of our anger; there is a difference between fire that rages uncontrolled and fire you use as a tool. Do I want a world of yelling? No. But I believe first you holler. Then you strategize. Then you act.

 

 

A Remarkable Woman: Sandra Lambert's A Certain Loneliness

 

 Sandra Lambert has given us another book of connected stories click, this time stories from her own life. Feminist bookstore owner, successful writer, outdoorswoman, nature photographer, and activist for lesbian, disability and other political rights, Lambert is a woman with many more abilities than disabilities.

 

Polio in early childhood led to hospitals, surgeries, body casts. Lambert grew up using crutches and leg braces, and much later in life graduated to first a manual, then an electric wheelchair.

In a built world designed for those who can walk, Lambert is attentive to her own body in a way many people aren’t. She devises ingenious work-arounds to physical limitations, and she is attuned to all her senses. Set apart by her visible disabilities, she was often lonely in childhood and adolescence, but as an adult lesbian has a large and loving community of friends, with whom she shares nature adventures, travel, food, dogs and writing. Though she doesn’t dwell on it, she mentions in passing her lively romantic life, crowned by a happy marriage in her sixties.

 

marrying at Payne's Prairie

 

Lambert doesn’t suffer well-meaning fools gladly. She puts readers on notice in the second chapter: no pity, no sanctimonious phrases, no offers of help unless she asks. At first in leg braces, later in a wheelchair, she will always encounter strangers who feel entitled to comment, who offer pity, praise, prayers. She’s learned to ignore them - “There’s a mute button in my head for these moments” - unless they touch her. In the laundromat a babbling Christian woman approaches from behind and hugs her, whispers “Jesus loves you.” Her wrath explodes. The mildest part of her response is her threat to call the cops.

 

image: Facebook.com/mango coin laundry

From earliest childhood, Lambert has found joy and solace in nature. Sitting on the wet ground in the woods among lilies of the valley, “the white pearls of flowers about to open would perch on my fingertips, and they seemed to have no weight...the confusions of where to sit on the school bus or why no one sat with me...lost any substance. The honey perfume of the disturbed plants rose around me.” She enjoys wind, rain, dawn and sunset, rolling over bumpy tracks through green woods to riverbanks strewn with alligators. Her writing is as sensuous as her life. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch, are all vividly there, and the words flow as smoothly as the rivers she loves. She relishes life.

 

image:visitgainesville.com

Kayaking, hiking in her chair - these bring Lambert into the wild. But she’s not close enough, and she seizes opportunities for direct contact with nature. As a child, “[w]ith braces and crutches left in a jumble...I’d crawl into snow-fed lakes with sudden, immense depths...These days I slip out of my wheelchair and into Florida waters. Spring-fed rivers, warm or cool depending on the season...Atlantic waves toss me until the seafloor scrapes against my skin.”

 

Briefly alone on the flooded Paynes Prairie  she drops from her wheelchair, and towing her kayak, wallows in the wet sand among dry-land plants now wilted and rotting in the water. “And now I think about an alligator swimming and searching for dry land. ...I lift onto my elbows and look around...[T]here are no alligators...I roll back into the new mud.”

 

one of many gator encounters

 

As she gets older she encounters new physical challenges, and increasing pain. Over and over she thinks through and solves the new problems. Here is an obstacle - here’s what she’ll do about it. When she makes plans, she accounts for the aftermath - a kayaking trip will be followed by days of exhaustion and pain, but is well worth it.

 

Lambert in her kayak.

Sometimes she realizes she can’t do anymore what she once loved, because of the expenditure of energy required. Then she’ll mourn the loss, and move on to other joys. But her writing is honest, and she acknowledges the times when she fears what the future will bring, the fear she calls her “personal image of the apocalypse,” that she has mockingly named, “the nursing home and bedsores panic.”

 

image:lazaruslaw.us

“...I can sense the deep sadness that will come, and I can’t yet see the other side of this, the part where something I couldn’t even have imagined comes into my life, where beyond fear and shame there is a grace of some sort. Is it even possible anymore? Do I keep trust that it will happen again, as it has always happened?”

Lambert shares her experience as an outsider, as a woman who must work harder than most of us to live a full life. But her memoir is much more than an account of coping with disability; it is the stories from that full life, stories of the happiness she has found or created. The writing is lyrical, and seasoned with humor, She doesn’t hesitate to laugh at herself. as when she discovers that the park ranger who seemed to be disturbed by her disability was in fact closely confronted by her naked butt in pants that had split down the middle.

image: fresnobee.com

 

What do I love about this book? The writing, the fierce wit, the remarkable woman who speaks from its pages. Disability activists remind the rest of us that we are only ‘temporarily abled.’ If we live long, we will keep encountering new limitations, and keep adjusting to them as best we can. If we are very smart, and very lucky, we may be able to hold on to joy and passion until close to the end, and face the challenges as creatively and intelligently as Lambert.

 

activist

nature photographer - night heron, spider lilies

 

unattributed pictures are from Sandra Lambert's Facebook page, and used with permission

 

A Certain Loneliness is available now from University of Nebraska Press http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/9781496207197/ and on Amazon.

The launch party for the book is September 14 at 6:30PM at the Matheson History Museum  513 East University Avenue  Gainesville, Florida.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The River's Memory - Sandra Gail Lambert

I have a bad habit of gobbling books, racing through them to see what happens next. (This is similar to the way I often eat.) But sometimes a really fine book will slow me down.  It’s partly a matter of vivid, melodious writing, with every word the right one and no words to spare. It makes me want to savor the sentences. And if the characters move me, the stories are page-turners, and it’s filled with delicious details, why wouldn’t I want to linger at the table?

image:Twisted Road Publications

The River’s Memory, a novel by Sandra Gail Lambert, not only rewarded my careful reading, but made me want to read it twice. It tells the separate stories of six women and one little girl who lived along the Silver River in north central Florida. Lambert writes as though she were possessed by her seven characters. She lives in their worlds, sees their visions, and dreams their dreams.  Each character becomes real, with her own distinctive voice. Because Lambert inhabits their lives, we do too, and care desperately about the fate of these women, all but one long gone.
                  

photographs by Sandra Gail Lambert: Waccassassa and Wekiva Rivers(north  Florida),  Silver River - night heron and spider lilies

All the characters are intimately connected to the river, and to wild nature. They are solitary, sometimes lonely - though some have lovers, their lives are centered in nature, work, their creative vision, or simply survival. Their stories give us the history of Florida from prehistoric times into the 21st century: the extinction of species, indigenous trade before the European invasion, lynchings, the first world war and the flu epidemic, and the tacky tourism overlay which, for so many people, represents Florida. Artifacts from one story - a pot shard, a dugout canoe, a shred of scarf, a silver hip flask, appear in the stories that follow.                     

dugout canoe submerged in Lake Pithlochoco, Gainesville FL image:semtribe.com

 

In the 16th century a Native American potter finds her clay and her inspiration in the river. Surrounded by enemies and treachery, brought down by illness, she holds onto her creative vision - all that matters is the clay, the next pot. From one enemy she hears rumors of invaders from across the sea:“...Men furred like animals, too many to count, who rode on top of beasts....they say that the hair dangled off their faces like moss and some of their chests shone like the sun. Weapons bounced off of them.”

Tristan da Luna - early invader image:flickr.com

 

Just before the Civil War, a little girl on the Florida frontier has the woods and the river for her playground. “I poke the caterpillar.  The yellow horns pop out of its back.  From this close, I can see the slime. I touch them and wipe my finger on the hem of my over slip, and it stains, but maybe Mother won’t see.  The horns flop and suck back under the skin.  I poke it again, and the horns do it again.  They look the same yellow as what ran out of the sore on Sister’s leg....Now I see all the other caterpillars... I pull at one and its feet suck onto the leaves.  I pull harder, and it keeps eating even with the back half of its body in the air....”

“Mist is lace on top of the water. A little more day and it’ll disappear. Sister and I wave our hands into the white, and it spins into the sky like smoke. I lean beside Sister and we reach our hands until they touch the water and make circles in our reflections.”     

Santa Fe River (north Florida) image:clubfla.org

 

It is 1918, the height of the War and the flu epidemic. We are at the Florida Industrial School for Girls, where inmates labor in the kitchen.  With contagion spreading through the school, an orphan girl runs away, looking for her grandparents’ old home. She finds it abandoned and in ruins.  She grieves and remembers, and her pain - aching head and bones, charred throat, itchy skin - seems to be one with her grief.                                          

Florida Industrial School for Girls image: State Archives of Florida Florida memory

 

During the Depression, a woman born with no legs, who walks on her hands, finds her freedom rowing and swimming in the river at night, communing with the manatees. She eases her constant pain with rum. Her parents have done their best to give her privacy and independence, while keeping her at home. They have built her a downstairs suite with a separate entrance. “But I don’t need a room of my own. I need the rest of the world.”

image:manatee-world.com

Boys who spot her in the river surround and torment her like mosquitoes. “The line of them have unbuttoned their pants.  They waggle small penises and laugh.  I’m on my second generation of little boys.  It seems that any of their parents who remember I’m a woman haven’t told them.  No one’s yelling Mockie or Jew boy, so this particular batch doesn’t know about that either.”

image:mccullagh.org

 

The end of the 20th century, and an old woman in a hospital. As she lies dying, her pain eased and tongue loosened by ample doses of painkilling drugs, she tells her memories to a prim lady from the local Historical Society.

Her lover - a 65-year-old woman with “sparkles of red” in her silver hair,“my gal”- comes to take her home, but she demands to be taken to the river instead. There she lies among pillows in an abandoned canoe, while her lover poles them down the river.

“Arrowhead stalks stretch up my spine and bloom their white flowers into my breasts.... A turtle swims away from us, the flip of her turtle feet a tickle along my ribs, and an alligator splashes off the sunny bank...I see the alligator’s old relative, the crocodile, blinking its transparent eyelids and swimming in the ancient ocean that existed here above us all.”

image:Sandra Gail Lambert

 

The sour salesclerk in the Silver Springs souvenir shop has worked there for thirty years. She observes the tourists buying tchotckes with grim amusement. “My ex-mother-in-law collected owls. I guess she still does. I guess women have to collect something so their families will know what to buy them for gifts.”

image:etsy.com

She’s been doing the job for thirty years, and now has to deal with her first “younger-than-I-am boss.” When she is fired, she runs from the security guards and climbs the fence to the river, where she is caught in a fierce winter storm.

10,000 years ago, when giant sloths still loomed twenty feet above the native hunters, and saber tooth tigers were not quite extinct, a woman travels the coast to trade with the river people on behalf of her tribe. “These people who live so far from the sea, they pack together, and they stink - of the sticky pine in their fires, the sour bark drink they make, the rock dust that floats from their chert quarry...” Lambert fully imagines the life of these prehistoric people - their tense negotiations in trade, their intimate knowledge of the natural world, the children who remain unnamed until they have survived the hazards of early childhood.

 

image: slothsanctuary.com

cast of 14-inch sloth claw. image:naturalworld1.blogspot

This is a book of the body, of the senses. Sights, sounds, smells, touch lead through memory to revelation or understanding. It is a book of close description, but not the sort that makes your eyes glaze over, waiting for something to for godsake happen. Each story is filled with suspense, often with violence, threat, and tragedy. And the details are so telling - funny, poignant, or heartbreaking. 

The River's Memory is a feast. Don't gobble it down; savor it.

Sandra Gail Lambert. image:Facebook

 

The River's Memory is available from your local independent bookstore, or from any of the usual venues, in paperback and ebook.

Comments: I'd love to hear from you. Click "comments" below.

Next post: August 29

 

Good Kings, Bad Kings

My writer friend Sandra, a voracious reader,  introduces me to many books I might not otherwise see.  Some of them take me into a world I have never thought about.

Good Kings, Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum is a novel set in the Illinois Learning and Life Skills Center, a nursing home for severely disabled children. It is a novel with a purpose, to let disabled characters speak for themselves.

Nussbaum believes such institutions “need to be done away with, once and for all” click.  But unlike so many writers with a cause, who hit you over the head with a righteous bludgeon, Nussbaum never seems to be preaching. She creates a fully realized world and gripping plots, and though she writes from the point of view of seven different characters, she mostly makes it work. I wasn’t far into the book before I recognized their vivid individual voices, and no longer needed to flip back through the pages to see who was who.

Three of the speaking characters are teenaged residents of the Center, three are employees, and one is an employee of the health care corporation which owns it.  Her job is to recruit new residents, and investigate Center operations to find cost cutting opportunities. 

The teenagers don’t define themselves by their disabilities, though the world may do so. They are typical teenagers - falling in love, mischief-making, yearning to be understood. They resent authority and scorn the adult world.

A FAMILIAR TEEN LOOK. IMAGE OF LINDSAY LEE USED WITH HER PERMISSION click

 

Listen to Yessenia, the fiercest and funniest of the gang.  She is a bad-ass 15-year-old who has just been released from juvenile detention. Her aunt who was raising her is dead, so she is placed at the Center, and attends Herbert Hoover High School.

I went there on account of I am physically challenged, and they send the people which have challenges to Hoover.  They send peope with physical challenges, but also retarded challenges, people been in accidents like brain accidents, or they’re blind or what have you.  I do not know why they send us all to the same place but that’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it looks like it will always be because I am in tenth grade and I been in cripple this or cripple that my whole sweet, succulent Puerto Rican life.

PUERTO RICAN DAY PARADE. IMAGE:LATINO.FOXNEWS.COM

 

  Moving into the center is a shock for Yessenia.

  They got the most stupidest rules in here that I ever heard of...You’re not allowed outside the damn building alone without passing another one of their bullshit tests.  By ‘outside the building’ they don’t mean plain old outside either.  They mean outside like ‘stay on the grass in front of the door.’ They think you’re too stupid to even walk out the door on your own.  I was raised in the city. I grew up in the Puerto Rican ghetto.  I think I know how to walk outside a damn door...you’re not allowed alone on a bus - a regular bus that I been taking by myself since I was a child - without a houseparent. This is almost worse than Juvie.  At least at Juvie you were suppose to be punished.

ACCESSIBLE CITY BUS. IMAGE:FCGOV.COM

 

Joanne, a disabled woman, is a data entry clerk at the center, who is connected to the Center for Disability Justice. She befriends some of the residents, and hopes to get them the subsidies the law provides so they can live independently when they reach 22.  Yessenia learns about disability activists from her, and when a boy dies after being scalded in the shower, Yessenia takes action. She chains herself to a tree with a sign “They kill and abuse children here.”

 
IMAGE: MIUSA.ORG  click

 

DISABILITY PROTEST IN CHICAGO. IMAGE: NGA.ADAPT.ORG  click

 

In response to the death and Yessenia’s protest, the board of directors hold a damage-control meeting. Michelle, the recruiter, takes notes.

[The lawyer wants to] take the emphasis off the small number of children who die [and emphasize] the very large number of children who live...I  write down, "Most children stay alive here.”

Cost-cutting means most employees wear several hats. Ricky, the Center’s bus driver, also has to restrain the children or take them to the time-out room when they misbehave.  He and Joanne become lovers, and he tells her

All I do all day is punish these children...When we’re in the bus - when me and the kids are in the bus everything’s cool.  We got our own little kingdom, you know?  But more and more all they want me to do is lock them up or hold them down and I hate it. I hate it.
And Joanne says to me, ‘ Maybe you need to think about getting out.’
I’m like, ‘ Yeah, but then I think they’ll get some other gorilla instead of me and at least if I’m doing the job it’s one less psycho messing with them, you know?’
‘Raping them,’ she says.
Neither one of us talks for a while after she says that.”

We hear from the child who is being repeatedly raped by one of the aides.  We hear from Teddy, the man who is in love with her, He is almost 22, and looking forward to independent living.

I’m starting to save my allowance up. It’s part of my plan for running away.  I saved last month’s allowance for a week...but then Louie stole it.  I know it was Louie cause he’s a asshole and I had it the night he worked and next morning it was gone. I had it under my seat cushion and he was the one who plugged my wheelchair into the charger after I was in bed.  It don’t do no good to complain.  They just say ‘I didn’t do it...’ and you can’t prove it they did.
When I’m on the loose I’m gonna get a place to live and an aide. I’m  gonna go to bed as late as I want. I’ll eat dinner when I want. I’ll have beer. I’ll take the bus wherever I feel like it....
The day I turn twenty-two they want to ship me off to a old people’s home. They’re going to stick me with the grandmas and the grandpas....So that’s why I got to run.

HIS MODEST AMBITION

 

We all begin life needing twenty-four hour assistance.  Those of us who are lucky gradually become more and more able to do for ourselves.  And then if we live long enough we may again need assistance. 
                               
Only the richest of us can afford a personal care attendant twenty-four hours a day, and society as a whole is not willing to subsidize such private care.  So we establish institutions, where we can achieve economies of scale, and then we try to avoid looking inside to see how those economies, and the additional economies of the profit motive, play out. 

 A RESIDENTIAL FACILITY

 We only value personal care-giving if it is provided free, by loving family members, usually women. Because care-giving is valued in sentiment rather than dollars and cents, we pay abysmally low wages to those who give care, and profit-driven corporations cut costs by reducing staff to dangerous levels.  The alternative, of funding well-paid assistance in individuals’ own homes or small group homes, seems too costly for us to bear.

I have quoted extensively from the book, because I really hope you will read it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll want to throw things. Nussbaum opens the doors of a dreadful place. She shows us lives and circumstances that most people have never seen. But though the book is horrifying, it is not depressing, because the characters are so impressive, and because things look pretty hopeful for some of them at the end. I feel lucky to have heard from them.

 

 

 

Encyclopedia White

I bought The Random House Children’s Encyclopedia at Amanda’s school book fair last fall.  It is simply beautiful - each article is one to three pages of blocked text with lots of interesting illustrations.  For several days she browsed through it, spending a lot of time on The Human Body and Reproduction.  Then it went on the shelf.

 

Yesterday I took it down to look through it.  Still thrilled by the format and illustrations, I looked up subjects at random (after all, it’s Random House).  A page about Ballet, with photos of Margot Fonteyn, Rudolf Nureyev, and Anna Pavlova, and a drawing of the five positions. 

 

                MARGOT FONTEYN. IMAGE:TELEGRAPH.CO.UK       

RUDOLPH NUREYEV WITH CARLA FRACCI. IMAGE XOOMER.VIRGILIO.IT

ANNA PAVLOVA. IMAGE:ARTSALIVE.CA
 

One for Barbarians, with a beautiful jeweled gold belt buckle. Past Bats and Birds to Castles - a most wonderful diagram/drawing of a castle with a cutaway to show the interior - storerooms, spiral staircase, and lord and lady’s richly furnished bedchamber.

 

IMAGE:ROYAL COLLECTION.ORG.UK
  

Circuses, Cities, Civil War.  One page for English, one page for American.  But where was Civil Rights?  The Find Out More section of Civil War - American sent me to Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and United States of America, history of.  The Lincoln page gave me the Gettysburg address, the log cabin, the election, secession, the war, Mount Rushmore, and a timeline including the Emancipation Proclamation.  The abolition movement was “led by white middle-class Northerners.” Harriet Tubman and Andrew Scott get a mention, but where is Frederic Douglass?

FREDERICK DOUGLASS. IMAGE:PBS.ORG

On to Slavery. A brief survey from Mesopotamia through Greece and Rome to the European slave trade and abolition, with some details about slave ships, slave markets, and slave rebellions.   

 

IMAGE: NYPL.ORG

United States of America, history of has a timeline. It includes entry into World War II, Kennedy’s assasination, Neil Armstrong on the moon, and Reagan signing the nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. WHERE IS THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT?     

Oh, good, there’s an index - one of my favorite parts of any non-fiction book.  And it does list the civil rights movement.  It sends me to a single page on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  The page includes seventy words for the whole movement, plus about fifty for Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott. Eyes, Oil, and Pirates get a whole page each.

Selecting topics for an encyclopedia must be an agonizing and disputatious process.  I can’t imagine doing it on my own, or even worse, with a group of “experts” all fiercely fighting for space. But neither can I imagine producing an encyclopedia for American children which doesn’t cover the Civil Rights Movement.

 

I'D LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU. CLICK "COMMENTS," BELOW

NEXT POST: OCTOBER 18

 

Anne Tyler - The Beginner's Goodbye

I have long been a fan of Anne Tyler.  She is a master of character, writing with intelligence, compassion and humor about ordinary lives. She says

My reason for writing is to live other lives, and I do that by burrowing deeper and deeper, quarter inch by quarter inch, into the center of those lives.

Her characters are quirky, but everyone, if sufficiently known, is quirky. No one is boring.  This is not to say that some people don’t bore us, especially if they won’t shut up, but if we could hear their thoughts, know their histories and habits, their joys and sorrows, we would find them unique and fascinating.

Though Tyler takes us deep inside her characters, the experience is not claustrophobic, because she achieves a perfect balance between action and response. (I’m currently reading a writer who writes one sentence of dialog or action followed by a paragraph of the character thinking about it. I’m choking.)

Many of Tyler’s books deal with marriage and family, the ties of time and affection that can bind people together despite conflicting expectations and desires, and radically different world views. She writes about the daily, often mundane incidents of ordinary lives - walking a dog, preparing a meal.
                   

image:petadvisor4U.blogspot.com

 

The incidents are peculiar, yet feel entirely realistic. In Accidental Tourist, Macon washes his clothes each night by stirring them around in the bathtub while he takes a shower. In Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the darkest Tyler book and probably my favorite, Pearl, in a rage at her daughter’s messy room, drags all the clothes out of the closet and dumps the dresser drawers out on the floor.  One of the funniest scenes I have ever read is at the beginning of Breathing Lessons, another favorite, when Maggie and Ira, her husband of twenty-eight years, are driving to a distant funeral and talking at cross-purposes - she wants to focus on their son’s relationship with his ex-wife, while he wants to understand how Maggie smashed up their car just as she exited a body shop.

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Anne Tyler is an accessible literary writer. Her writing never intrudes, or distracts us from the characters and story.  There is no self-indulgence here, no ‘Look at me, I’m writing’ pyrotechnics, just a smooth flow of language that carries us deeper and deeper into the characters’ lives.  Still,  because I write, I tend to notice and analyze a felicitous phrase, and from many years back I remember her description of a woman washing dishes as she watches her children out the kitchen window, “her careless ease with dishes, ceaseless care with children.’  I marvel at that - I’m sure that rhetoric has a name for such word play.

         
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For years I devoured each of Anne Tyler’s novels when it appeared, and then for a while I lost track of her. I recently found her again, and read The Beginner’s Goodbye. 

Aaron Woolcott's wife Dorothy was killed when a tree fell on their house and crushed her. Now, according to Aaron, she has come back.  The novel is about healing from a loved one’s death.  That description could fit a self-help book, but here there are no platitudes, no encouraging advice. It is a vivid, comical tale of loss and recovery.

Aaron begins his story with, “The strangest thing about my wife’s return from the dead was how people reacted.” Immediately I accepted his point of view, though for most of us the strangest thing would be not the reaction but the return.
       
She was unique among women, Dorothy. She was one of a kind.  Lord, she left a hole behind.  I felt as if I’d been erased, as if I’d been ripped in two.  Then I looked down the street and saw her standing on the sidewalk.

image:exploreuk.uky.edu

Dorothy keeps reappearing - at the farmers’ market, in the street, outside their house.  He is eager to see and talk with her, and looks for her everywhere. Aaron believes both that she is ‘real’ and that it is all in his head.

I had first tried to do without her - to.’get over’ my loss, ‘find closure,’ ‘move on,’ all those ridiculous phrases people use when they’re urging you to endure the unendurable.  But eventually she had faced the fact that we simply missed each other too much.  She had given in and returned. That’s what I liked to believe.

Aaron’s account of their life together is filled with his love and grief, his memories, his regrets. He argues with her each time she reappears, and concludes that although he loved her, their marriage was unhappy, or at least difficult.

He reviews their clumsy courtship, when he was eager as a puppy and she was unaware they were courting, and goes on to explain the many ways they were at odds with each other. He loved her for her lack of feminine charm - her frumpiness, her failure to nurture him - but also resented it. He was blind to her hesitant attempts to take care of him, to make herself more attractive. When they married she diffidently offered to wear a white dress -“I could do that. I wouldn’t mind.” and went on to describe it in detail, including a bouquet. And he responded “We’re neither of us the type for that, thank heaven.”
           

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Other people - his colleagues at the vanity press where he is an editor, his neighbor, his sister - try to offer comfort and companionship, but he fends them off, much the same way he fended Dorothy off.  Eventually he does 'find closure, get over it, and move on,' though he says

It’s like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket.  It’s still there, but the sharpest edges are muffled, sort of.  Then, every now and then, I lift a corner of the blanket, just to check, and -whoa! Like a knife!

Lately I’ve been preoccupied with loss, dreading not my own death, but the death of people I love.  This is probably a function of my age. You needn’t be 65, or morbidly obsessed, however, to enjoy The Beginner's Goodbye. If you like fascinating, maddening characters, and you enjoy laughing out loud when you read, do try Anne Tyler.

    

I'm a big Anne Tyler fan

Letters of a Woman Homesteader

I love to read about pioneer women, about their struggles and hardships, their courage and strength. They worked so hard, found joy in tiny simple things, and  came together in celebration and sorrow.

I know that the pioneers made their lives by destroying the world of the Native Americans.  This sentence would logically be followed by a “but...,” and an excuse, but I have no exculpatory statement to make about the brutal imperialism of the westward movement.  I only have my belief that we must take history as we find it, and my awareness that my own comfortable life is built on the oppression of others, at home and around the world, and so I won’t cast the first stone.

Elinore Pruitt Stewart was a homesteader in Wyoming when she wrote these letters to her friend Mrs. Coney.  She had been working in Denver as a laundress, furnace tender and housekeeper to support herself and her 4-year-old daughter Jerrine.  She hated the city, and wanted her own homestead, so she placed an ad seeking employment on a ranch, with the idea she would learn about ranching life as she established her claim.  A Scottish homesteader, Clyde Stewart, hired her as a housekeeper for his small cattle ranch.
 

CLYDE STEWART'S HOMESTEAD, FROM WYOMINGTALESANDTRAILS.COM

Elinor was an adventurous young woman.  She says, “I wanted to just knock about foot-loose and free to see life as a gypsy sees it.  I had planned to see the Cliff Dwellers’ home; to live right there until I caught the spirit of the surroundings enough to live over their lives in imagination anyway.  I had planned to see the old missions and to go to Alaska; to hunt in Canada.  I even dreamed of Honolulu ...I aimed to see all the world I could, but...first I wanted to try homesteading.” As it turned out, homesteading was all the adventure she had, and all the adventure she needed.

Clyde Stewart is a comical character in her letters. “Mr. Stewart is absolutely no trouble, for as soon as he has his meals he retires to his room and plays on his bagpipe...It is ‘The Campbells are Coming,’ without variations,...from seven till eleven at night.  Sometimes I wish they would make haste and get here.”  Six weeks after her arrival, she married him.  She kept it a secret from Mrs. Coney for a year, ashamed that she married so quickly. “But although I married in haste, I have no cause to repent.  That is very fortunate because I have never had one bit of leisure to repent in.”  

RON LEISHMAN CARTOON AT CLIPARTOF.COM

 Even after marriage she was resolutely independent. She had filed her first claim, on the land adjoining Mr. Stewart’s, soon after she arrived in Wyoming, and planned to file for another 160 acres in the desert as soon as she had enough cash: $40 to file and $160 after five years. “I should not have married if Clyde had not promised I should meet all my land difficulties unaided.  I wanted the fun and the experience.”
                       

ELINOR PRUITT STEWART ON HAY MOWER, FROM EPSRANCH.COM

In her first summer in Wyoming, Elinore mowed hay for over two months.  She also milked the cows every day, did all the cooking for the ranchhands, and put up sixty pints of jellies made from wild fruits. 

When the ranchhands departed for the roundup and there was a lull in the work, she went camping in the mountains with a saddle horse and pack horse, Jerrine riding behind her. On their second morning they woke to find new snow weighing down the tree branches that sheltered them. It was still snowing hard, and she says, “I began to think how many kinds of idiot I was.  Here I was thirty or forty miles from home, in the mountains where no one goes in the winter...”

But as they rode through the snowstorm they came across the little farm of Zebulon Pike Parker, an 80-year-old sheep farmer who was too tender-hearted to sell any of his thirty sheep.  They spent the night with him, breakfasting on coffee, venison steak, hoe cakes and honey, and then he accompanied them on the two-day journey home.  Zebulon and Elinore became the best of friends, and later she reunited him with his southern family - he was illiterate so he had not been able to stay in touch.

ILLUSTRATION BY N.C.WYETH from LETTERS OF A WOMAN HOMESTEADER

 

Elinore made friends of all ages and types.  When the ranch hands were out on the range and there was no one to cook for, she was free to go off on adventures.  With Mrs. Louderer, a lonely German widow, she prepared a Christmas feast for the shepherds in a dozen distant camps.  Because cattle men and sheep men were enemies, she didn’t mention her Christmas plans to Clyde, but after cooking for several days to keep her household supplied, she set off to Mrs. Louderer’s ranch.

“I never worked harder in my life or had such a pleasant time... We roasted six geese, boiled three small hams and three hens.  We had besides several meat loaves and links of sausage.  We had twelve large loaves of the best rye bread; a small tub of doughnuts, twelve coffee-cakes...and also a quantity of little cakes with seeds, nuts and fruits in them, - so pretty to look at and so good to taste...I had [brought] thirteen pounds of butter and six pint jars of jelly, so we melted the jelly and poured it into twelve glasses.”  They drove across the country in their four-horse sled - “Tam O’Shanter and Paul Revere were snails compared to us” - delivering twelve boxes of Christmas feasts to the delighted shepherds.

SHEPHERD, FROM KNOWLEDGECENTER.UNR.EDU

Elinore was quick to help a a stranger in need, who then became a friend.  She organized a huge birthday celebration for an ancient woman who was raising her granddaughter.  The feasting went on all day and the guests left the next morning.  At the end of a long letter telling the story, she mentions that she has been very busy, arranging the funeral for "a dear little child [who] has joined the angels." 

A year and a half later she confessed to Mrs. Coney that it was her own son who had died.  “For a long time my heart was crushed.  He was such a sweet, beautiful boy.  I wanted him so much.  He died of erisypelas.  I held him in my arms till the last agony was over.  Then I dressed the beautiful body for the grave....Little Jamie was the first little Stewart.  God has given me two more precious little sons.  The old sorrow is not so keen now.  I can bear to tell you about it, but I never could before.”

Elinor’s life was filled with love, adventure, humor, friendship, and incredibly hard work.  She relished life even when she was engulfed by sorrow.  “When you think of me, you must think of me as one who is truly happy.” She lists her blessings: “my home among the blue mountains, my healthy, well-formed children, my clean, honest husband, my kind, gentle milk cows, my garden [with] loads and loads of flowers...chickens, turkeys and pigs which are my own special care.  I have some slow old gentle horses and an old wagon. I can load up the kiddies and go where I please any time.  I have the best, kindest neighbors and I have my dear absent friends.  Do you wonder I am so happy?  When I think of it all, I wonder how I can crowd all my joy into one short life.”
                

 ELINOR PRUITT STEWART, FROM NEW FRONTIERS, UNKNEWS.COM

 

Note: Elinor made ample use of poetic license in her letters.  According to information on wyomingtalesandtrails.com, Stewart left her first husband after a year of marriage.  He was still alive when she married Clyde.  Though she presents herself as a southerner, she actually grew up in Oklahoma. And Clyde was born in Pennsylvania, rather than being an immigrant from Scotland.  She lost the right to file a claim when she married, so her claim had to be made in the name of her mother-in-law, who was a head of household.

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Poetry Daily

My favorite place on the Web is Poetry Daily. Every day it gives me a new poem, from one of hundreds of literary journals and books. When I find a poem I like, I put it in a fat, three-ring binder, my own anthology. click

Louis Untermeyer’s  A Treasury of Great Poems, English and American, introduced me to poetry in ninth grade.  All the scattered bits that remain in my memory come from that year and that book. “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind...”  “I like it because it is bitter, and because it is my heart...”  “Love at the lips was touch as sweet as I could bear...”  I loved that book, but I left all my books (and my first husband) behind when I was twenty-three.

                               
LEFT BEHIND

 

I found the Treasury again at our library’s semi-annual used book sale. I paid two dollars and was reunited with hundreds of old friends. click

At 94 my father astonished a dinner party by reciting Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, all fifty lines.  He glowed with pride, and deserved to.  Doris, my sister-in-law, once recited the preamble to Intimations of Immortality. She seemed to do it for the sheer pleasure of hearing the words.  My sister followed with Jabberwocky.
 
I have always wished I had a big collection of poetry in my head.  It would entertain me when I have to wait in line, or when I am imprisoned in a small cell for my courageous political actions, or, perhaps more likely, in a hospital bed for one or another ailment of age.
               
When I retired I decided to memorize poetry.  I started with Elinor Wylie, “Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones, there’s something in this richness that I hate.”  I struggled to remember the poet's exact words, as she no doubt struggled to choose them, though some, I hope, came as a gift.  Over and over I repeated the whole sonnet, until it seemed to be firmly planted.  An hour later it was gone. 

In my computer I have a file of the ten poems I managed to memorize.  I wish I had such a file in my brain.  Each poem I added drove out the previous one.

download my ten poems

Years ago, I paid my two foster children to memorize short poems.  I believe I paid them a quarter. The first poem was

                                        I never saw a purple cow
                                        I never hope to see one
                                        But I can tell you anyhow
                                        I’d rather see than be one.

 
PHOTOBUCKET.COM BY RESPHINA

 

Like many other plans from our early days together, when I thought I could achieve perfection, this one soon fell by the wayside and our path descended into the mucky quotidian. 

I would like to try the same thing with Amanda.  She already knows the pleasure of rhyme and rhythm.  But Joe believes it is wrong to pay for learning, which should be its own reward.  He is adamant, so I concede, though I still believe it’s a good idea.
                                   
I read poetry for months at a time, and then I let it go.  Every time I come back to it I am renewed.  Thank you, Poetry Daily, for the daily gift.

 

 

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