This guest review by Jo Freeman originally appeared at:
http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/freeman/articlesFreemanAlice.html
"Princess Alice"
a review of
Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker
by Stacy A. Cordery
Viking - Penguin Group (USA)
October 2007
xiv, 590 pp.
The United States doesn’t have a royal family, but sometimes it has royalty. Dubbed Princess Alice by the press, the eldest daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt acted the part and kept the nickname – not always happily – for the rest of her 96 years.
Moving into the White House at age 17 when her father succeeded the assassinated William McKinley, she was an instant hit with the press. Smoking, gambling and driving automobiles at a time when proper young ladies just did not do those things, her actions and words sold papers. Indeed, the widely read stories about her shenanigans encouraged other young women to emulate her long before the flappers of the 1920s.
TR took advantage of people’s fascination with his teen-age daughter to send her on political and diplomatic missions where she was treated like royalty. She loved the attention, and politely stood in endless reception lines as a representative of her father.
Born on February 12, 1884 to TR’s first wife Alice Lee, who died two days later, she was raised by her aunt for her first three years, joining her father only after he married again. Step-mother Edith added four boys and another girl to Teddy’s brood, but none would ever be as demanding, or as well known, as Alice.
Although the star at the first debutante ball ever held at the White House, she was jealous of the "better" one given her sister six years later. President Roosevelt once commented to a friend that "I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both."
Typical of a daughter of the privileged class, she lacked formal education but not money. A trust fund from her mother’s family gave her an annual income but she always felt like she couldn’t keep up with her very wealthy friends. During the social season she looked for a rich husband and settled on Nicholas Longworth, a Member of Congress from Ohio, 15 years her senior with family wealth of his own. With him she lived in comfort until his death in 1931.
Nick was a rising star in Congress when they married and a powerful one as Speaker from 1925 until the Democrats won the House in the election of 1930. They shared a passion for politics and an active social life, but not much else. Nick had several mistresses, dying in the home of one them. Alice had her own lover, Senator William Borah of Idaho, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the 1920s, with whom she had a daughter in 1925.
She forgave Nick his sexual disloyalty but not his political disloyalty. In the election of 1912 he supported the re-election of fellow Ohioan William Howard Taft (his mentor in politics) for President rather than her father. (TR beat Taft, but Wilson won the election). The Longworths stayed together as a Washington power couple (divorce was socially unacceptable) but otherwise went their own ways.
Alice did not like Nick’s family, or Ohio. While she rejected suggestions that she succeed Nick in Congress, she maintained a residence in Cincinnati so she could vote and be a delegate to Republican National Conventions. But she lived out her life in the District of Columbia, where she eventually became known as "the other Washington Monument."
With the access and status conferred by her father, her husband and her lover, Alice played the game of Washington insider for several decades. She educated herself on the issues of the day through prolific reading, conversations with some of the best minds in the country, and attendance at Congressional committee meetings and debates. Her political acumen was lauded by her contemporaries. Her house became a salon and her dinner parties the place to find out what was really going on.
Although petrified by public speaking, in an intimate atmosphere she was captivating. Senators John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon said that she was their favorite dinner partner and she never lacked for male companionship. After Borah’s death in 1940, United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis became her "steady companion" for many years.
Alice acquired a reputation as a wit, noted for her barbs and repartee. She often said that she cared nothing for social convention or what other people thought of her. She liked being outrageous and spoke her mind with an attitude of "detached malevolence" (her words). One of her best friends gave her an embroidered pillow which Alice proudly showed off. It said: "If you haven’t got anything good to say about anyone come and sit by me."
Her acid tongue became more vitriolic when her fifth cousin became President. She despised FDR and his programs, and never passed up an opportunity to say so -- even though cousin Eleanor still invited her to the White House. In 1935 she began a regular newspaper column with critiques of the New Deal that readers wouldn’t find in Eleanor’s "My Day" column.
Following her father, Alice began as a progressive Republican but over time became an isolationist and a conservative. She was a central figure (along with Borah) in the Irreconcilables who lobbied against the League of Nations; her home was their headquarters. Twenty years later she became a charter member of the America First Committee which demanded that "Congress refrain from war, even if England is on the verge of defeat."
She supported Taft over Eisenhower in 1952 – even though he was the son of her father’s 1912 opponent. In the 1960s she shifted direction, supporting Lyndon Johnson, the civil rights movement and eventually feminism and gay rights (though she stood by Nixon when few others did).
This book is full of fascinating stories about a fascinating woman. Like the British aristocracy, Alice was so secure in her position that she could do and say what was not proper without fear of social ostracism. The rules just didn’t apply to her.
While telling Alice’s story, the author also provides insight into this branch of the Roosevelt family. They and their marital partners had more than their share of alcoholism and suicides. Alice’s uncle (Eleanor’s father), at least one brother, husband, and son-in-law, all had their lives ruined or shortened by alcohol – even during Prohibition.
There are also glimpses into the social mores of the upper class. It appears that while divorce would have been scandalous, sleeping around and stealing each other’s mates was not – even for socially proper women. While Alice imbibed as a teenager, she became a Dry during Prohibition out of disgust at the way her social class misused alcohol (she did like to go against the grain).
This book is more than a biography. It’s a social history and a family history. As Alice did with many of her books, you will stay up late reading for the sheer pleasure of it.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
The Cleft
by Doris Lessing (London: Fourth Estate [HarperCollins], 2007, 260 pp.)
The Cleft was published only a few months before Lessing was announced as the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, for her prolific lifetime of writing. For those who maintain The Golden Notebook (1962) was the high point of Lessing's literary achievement, The Cleft will be another in a long series of further disappointments. The Golden Notebook remains far and away Lessing's most literarily controlled piece of writing. It uses a complex set of rubrics, but its content replays a great deal that appears in the five-volume semi-autobiographical Martha Quest series (The Children of Violence). Two of the books of that series appeared in print after The Golden Notebook, but judging by style I'd hypothesize that really only the last, The Four-Gated City (1969) represents the stylistic and content breakthrough Lessing learned and one might say earned from doing the restrictive exercise of putting together The Golden Notebook.
Somewhere in the middle of The Four-Gated City, Lessing abandons realism (albeit a realism with a bit of psychic phenomenon involved) and the present, and takes the world and her characters into a period of massive dislocation. As best I can tell from my own intense but not total reading of her works, this is her earliest foray into the "space fiction" genre that is much derided by many of her reviewers.
Personally, I'm very delighted with many of Lessing's works of space fiction. In The Golden Notebook, there are many different kinds of fragments agglomerated into a single structural concretion. In the later works, the pieces are given their own space and are more accessible to contemplation. Lessing's brilliantly thought-provoking Shikasta series makes me think of Anais Nin's conception of her own series of short novels, Cities of the Interior, which Nin describes as "a mobile in space." There's a lot of space, literally as well as figuratively, between the different novels in Lessing's Shikasta series. But my favourite Shikasta novels, especially The Marriage between Zones Three, Four and Five, and The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, contain strong insights and a lot of the very wicked Lessing sense of humour. They are not science fiction (a genre I actually loathe) at all, but closer to the satirical fantasy tradition of Gulliver's Travels.
The Cleft is not precisely "space fiction," but one might call it "time fiction." Its framework is very clever - an historian in the Roman Empire looks back at documents he says survive in his time from ancient transcriptions of an even more ancient oral tradition. The position of the historian is within the prototypical literate colonial society that still gives form to our own time. He is attempting to re-create the origins of gender relations, beginning with parthenogenetic females, who suddenly start giving birth to more and more deformed monsters, who eventually become understood as both human themselves and necessary for future human fertility.
Lessing often says that she is not a feminist. Recently she was quoted as saying that all the topics feminists thought they invented were being discussed long before that [her ism, which she describes herself as having exorcised with the writing of The Golden Notebook, was Communism]. She also, if you take the evidence of The Children of Violence series, had a somewhat sadistic mother, which would incline one not to put all hope for the world upon the mothering sex. So, it is not too surprising, although hard to approve, that she has the early females in her story rejecting and sometimes torturing and mutilating the deformed creatures that are the male babies. Tortured escapees from female society (helped by eagles) are the founders of the separate and different male society. Frankly, I don't feel the female ur-society she lays out depicts enough of the frustrations and thwarted ambitions that would ordinarily go into making sadists psychologically, and so the torture reports seem a bit gratuitious. But by having the historian who tells the stories be male, and much of the oral history he analyzes being from males, she builds in a rationale for this possible distortion. Clearly, Lessing is speculating from her own nearly 9 decades of human experience about how it came to be that men fear women and women disapprove of men and consider them careless of the essentials of human security and development.
I'll leave this review without a great deal more comment. The Cleft has something of the emotional feel (or lack of emotional feel) of the Canongate Myths series - in which well known and great writers were set the task of rewriting ancient canonical tales. In The Cleft, one is left to suspect that the tale that is being rewritten was perhaps expunged from the canon - perhaps indeed around the time of the Roman Empire. Stories of woman born from man cover over this old story of man born from woman, at first rejected, ultimately necessary, changing woman's life irrevocably, but still without her wellbeing and that of their children firmly at heart.
Postscript: CBC Radio's program Writers & Company just re-aired a 2004 interview with Doris Lessing, by Eleanor Wachtel. You can listen to this (it's 52 minutes long) in Real Audio at:
http://cbc.ca/writersandcompany/media/071014_lessing.ram
The Cleft was published only a few months before Lessing was announced as the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, for her prolific lifetime of writing. For those who maintain The Golden Notebook (1962) was the high point of Lessing's literary achievement, The Cleft will be another in a long series of further disappointments. The Golden Notebook remains far and away Lessing's most literarily controlled piece of writing. It uses a complex set of rubrics, but its content replays a great deal that appears in the five-volume semi-autobiographical Martha Quest series (The Children of Violence). Two of the books of that series appeared in print after The Golden Notebook, but judging by style I'd hypothesize that really only the last, The Four-Gated City (1969) represents the stylistic and content breakthrough Lessing learned and one might say earned from doing the restrictive exercise of putting together The Golden Notebook.
Somewhere in the middle of The Four-Gated City, Lessing abandons realism (albeit a realism with a bit of psychic phenomenon involved) and the present, and takes the world and her characters into a period of massive dislocation. As best I can tell from my own intense but not total reading of her works, this is her earliest foray into the "space fiction" genre that is much derided by many of her reviewers.
Personally, I'm very delighted with many of Lessing's works of space fiction. In The Golden Notebook, there are many different kinds of fragments agglomerated into a single structural concretion. In the later works, the pieces are given their own space and are more accessible to contemplation. Lessing's brilliantly thought-provoking Shikasta series makes me think of Anais Nin's conception of her own series of short novels, Cities of the Interior, which Nin describes as "a mobile in space." There's a lot of space, literally as well as figuratively, between the different novels in Lessing's Shikasta series. But my favourite Shikasta novels, especially The Marriage between Zones Three, Four and Five, and The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, contain strong insights and a lot of the very wicked Lessing sense of humour. They are not science fiction (a genre I actually loathe) at all, but closer to the satirical fantasy tradition of Gulliver's Travels.
The Cleft is not precisely "space fiction," but one might call it "time fiction." Its framework is very clever - an historian in the Roman Empire looks back at documents he says survive in his time from ancient transcriptions of an even more ancient oral tradition. The position of the historian is within the prototypical literate colonial society that still gives form to our own time. He is attempting to re-create the origins of gender relations, beginning with parthenogenetic females, who suddenly start giving birth to more and more deformed monsters, who eventually become understood as both human themselves and necessary for future human fertility.
Lessing often says that she is not a feminist. Recently she was quoted as saying that all the topics feminists thought they invented were being discussed long before that [her ism, which she describes herself as having exorcised with the writing of The Golden Notebook, was Communism]. She also, if you take the evidence of The Children of Violence series, had a somewhat sadistic mother, which would incline one not to put all hope for the world upon the mothering sex. So, it is not too surprising, although hard to approve, that she has the early females in her story rejecting and sometimes torturing and mutilating the deformed creatures that are the male babies. Tortured escapees from female society (helped by eagles) are the founders of the separate and different male society. Frankly, I don't feel the female ur-society she lays out depicts enough of the frustrations and thwarted ambitions that would ordinarily go into making sadists psychologically, and so the torture reports seem a bit gratuitious. But by having the historian who tells the stories be male, and much of the oral history he analyzes being from males, she builds in a rationale for this possible distortion. Clearly, Lessing is speculating from her own nearly 9 decades of human experience about how it came to be that men fear women and women disapprove of men and consider them careless of the essentials of human security and development.
I'll leave this review without a great deal more comment. The Cleft has something of the emotional feel (or lack of emotional feel) of the Canongate Myths series - in which well known and great writers were set the task of rewriting ancient canonical tales. In The Cleft, one is left to suspect that the tale that is being rewritten was perhaps expunged from the canon - perhaps indeed around the time of the Roman Empire. Stories of woman born from man cover over this old story of man born from woman, at first rejected, ultimately necessary, changing woman's life irrevocably, but still without her wellbeing and that of their children firmly at heart.
Postscript: CBC Radio's program Writers & Company just re-aired a 2004 interview with Doris Lessing, by Eleanor Wachtel. You can listen to this (it's 52 minutes long) in Real Audio at:
http://cbc.ca/writersandcompany/media/071014_lessing.ram
Monday, August 20, 2007
The Garden of Ruth
by Eva Etzioni-Halevy (New York: Plume Books [Penguin], 2007), 293 pp.
The author of this book promoted it avidly to me, which inclined me to dislike it, but I don't.
At first I thought it was going to be an historical excuse for a romance novel, but I changed my mind. What's best about the book is its meticulous but not overburdened description of a place and time familiar from the Hebrew bible. Actually, two places and times. The first heroine of the book, Osnath, is a literate young woman who arrives in Bethlehem as a visitor, just in time to meet the young shepherd David who is first showing the signs of talent and leadership that will make him a king. The two sides of that king's personality are also soon apparent - I'll say no more, in case you read the book.
Osnath, being literate, starts looking around her host's scroll room and finds some fragments of writing that intrigue her. The main plot of the book is her successful investigation of the story of David's grandmother, Ruth, the Moabite whom many remember as allying herself with her mother-in-law Naomi: "whither thou goest, I shall go..."
Halevy fills in the blanks of that rather sketchy story of Ruth in a plausible manner that includes facts of ancient family law - in this book, somewhat laxly enforced. Of considerable interest to me as a feminist were the parts dealing with polygamy and the areas of sexual liberty the heroines explore. It almost felt like watching a barrel race, seeing the author guide her story this way and that between the givens of the biblical story and related facts.
Something that is pleasing but also possibly dubious about The Garden of Ruth is the almost modern sensibility that the author creates for her protagonists, who lived approximately 3,000 years ago. Looking on the web, I found the author's website and her Study Guide for the book. Here's a sample question:
The idea that a woman or women may have written some biblical literature is not new. See, for example, The Book of J by David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom (NY: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), a re-translation and analysis of writings from the time of David's son Solomon, opining that the anonymous author must have been a woman.
One of the things I wondered about in The Garden of Ruth was the fictional tale-writer's name, Osnath. The only traces I found of this word on the web related to Sarah (or Sara) Osnath-Halevy, a 1930s folk-singer from Yemen Perhaps a relative of the author? I asked Etzioni-Halevy - emailing her in Israel - and she'd never heard of the singer. She says that Osnath was the name of Joseph's wife, and that her heroine was from that same tribe, the tribe of Efraim.
Etzioni-Halevy's historical note at the back of the book explains that her novel is set in the time of transition between the rule of the judge/prophet/generals (Osnath's uncle is the judge/prophet Samuel, who anoints David) and the time of the kings. In a way, you could say that federalism was taking place among the tribes. These developments are mentioned in The Garden of Ruth, but as background.[NB: There are disputes among historians as to the times of Biblical events and indeed whether many of them happened at all as reported.]
Probably my biggest disappointment in this book was that Etzioni-Halevy chooses a thoroughly heterosexual reason for Ruth to follow Naomi from Moab to Bethlehem. Their relationship was nicely depicted as somewhat fond but largely practical. I'm waiting for someone else to write a version in which Ruth and Naomi are in love with each other, and having babies for Boaz is just a job.
The author of this book promoted it avidly to me, which inclined me to dislike it, but I don't.
At first I thought it was going to be an historical excuse for a romance novel, but I changed my mind. What's best about the book is its meticulous but not overburdened description of a place and time familiar from the Hebrew bible. Actually, two places and times. The first heroine of the book, Osnath, is a literate young woman who arrives in Bethlehem as a visitor, just in time to meet the young shepherd David who is first showing the signs of talent and leadership that will make him a king. The two sides of that king's personality are also soon apparent - I'll say no more, in case you read the book.
Osnath, being literate, starts looking around her host's scroll room and finds some fragments of writing that intrigue her. The main plot of the book is her successful investigation of the story of David's grandmother, Ruth, the Moabite whom many remember as allying herself with her mother-in-law Naomi: "whither thou goest, I shall go..."
Halevy fills in the blanks of that rather sketchy story of Ruth in a plausible manner that includes facts of ancient family law - in this book, somewhat laxly enforced. Of considerable interest to me as a feminist were the parts dealing with polygamy and the areas of sexual liberty the heroines explore. It almost felt like watching a barrel race, seeing the author guide her story this way and that between the givens of the biblical story and related facts.
Something that is pleasing but also possibly dubious about The Garden of Ruth is the almost modern sensibility that the author creates for her protagonists, who lived approximately 3,000 years ago. Looking on the web, I found the author's website and her Study Guide for the book. Here's a sample question:
14. Although this story takes place in biblical times, some of the issues Ruth deals with--unwanted pregnancy, religious persecution versus tolerance, religious conversion--are still relevant today. Discuss these issues as they relate to the time of the novel and the modern day. Have people progressed since biblical times? Are we any more adept at dealing with these situations than Ruth was?
The idea that a woman or women may have written some biblical literature is not new. See, for example, The Book of J by David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom (NY: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), a re-translation and analysis of writings from the time of David's son Solomon, opining that the anonymous author must have been a woman.
One of the things I wondered about in The Garden of Ruth was the fictional tale-writer's name, Osnath. The only traces I found of this word on the web related to Sarah (or Sara) Osnath-Halevy, a 1930s folk-singer from Yemen Perhaps a relative of the author? I asked Etzioni-Halevy - emailing her in Israel - and she'd never heard of the singer. She says that Osnath was the name of Joseph's wife, and that her heroine was from that same tribe, the tribe of Efraim.
Etzioni-Halevy's historical note at the back of the book explains that her novel is set in the time of transition between the rule of the judge/prophet/generals (Osnath's uncle is the judge/prophet Samuel, who anoints David) and the time of the kings. In a way, you could say that federalism was taking place among the tribes. These developments are mentioned in The Garden of Ruth, but as background.[NB: There are disputes among historians as to the times of Biblical events and indeed whether many of them happened at all as reported.]
Probably my biggest disappointment in this book was that Etzioni-Halevy chooses a thoroughly heterosexual reason for Ruth to follow Naomi from Moab to Bethlehem. Their relationship was nicely depicted as somewhat fond but largely practical. I'm waiting for someone else to write a version in which Ruth and Naomi are in love with each other, and having babies for Boaz is just a job.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Clayoquot: The Sound of My Heart
by Betty Shiver Krawczyk (Victoria, BC, Canada: Orca Books, 1996, 215 pp.)
Betty Krawczyk (locally pronounced KRAW-zik) is in jail right now. She got arrested for demonstrating on Eagle Ridge Bluffs against the tearing down those eponymous bluffs in order to widen the highway to the Whistler ski resort. Part of the issue is the coming Olympics. Part is the cheapness of the province and its PPP partners (Public-Private Partnerships, in which the public helps business turn our infrastructure into a profit centre) in not being willing to pay for a tunnel. Krawczyk was born in 1928, so she is no spring chicken, but as she says in this book,
Clayoquot is the story of Krawczyk's radicalization. The book intercuts two different timelines: a "present" story about her life in a cabin at Clayoquot Sound and how that led to her becoming an activist for old-growth forests, and a biographical narrative. The latter starts with her Catholic Cajun girlhood in a close-knit Louisiana community; she got cold-shouldered out of there when she refused to oppose racial integration. After that she did things like get married a few times, have kids, work. She met feminists and other progressive people and thought about their ideas. You can see that she was not just a natural "aginner" but gradually found her way to a different way of thinking, relating, and acting on the basis of experience.
When I first started reading, I was a little put off by all the misspellings, but after a while I decided it wasn't the mark of a poor author, but a literally poor publisher who wouldn't spring for proofreading. The book is physically very nicely published, though; it's a trade paperback with good paper, decent-sized type, and an attractive stiff cover that has built-in flaps you can use to mark your place.
The shape of the book's writing is skillful: her characterizations are pithy and empathetic; dramatic events are recounted, but not milked for length; the intercutting of different time periods adds a lot of suspense, and simultaneously covers for the abandon with which she jumps from one pivotal event in her life to another. As we read, we find out that she taught herself to be a professional writer, and that her early work was for "true confessions" magazines (a genre I must confess I consumed avidly in my early teens).
I haven't finished the book yet, I'm reading it slowly and savouring it. One of the early scenes is of a mass campout against old-growth forest logging, and it reminds me of a similar scene in Jeannette Armstrong's Whispering in Shadows (see my review in the 2006 section of this blog). Armstrong is a First Nations woman, and Krawczyk writes about not talking with the indigenous people then, because she didn't know what to ask. Obviously, she recovered from this reticence later.
At Eagle Ridge Bluffs, she was arrested along with respected Aboriginal Elder Harriet Nahanee. Harriet died February 24 2007 at age 71, of an illness that went untreated for the two weeks she was forced to serve in jail for blocking the road development. The picture to the right is from an article about the two of them and their cause that appeared in the online newspaper The Tyee in March of 2007.
(Right, Betty Krawczyk; centre, Harriet Nahanee. Photo by C. Grabowski)
Betty Krawczyk (locally pronounced KRAW-zik) is in jail right now. She got arrested for demonstrating on Eagle Ridge Bluffs against the tearing down those eponymous bluffs in order to widen the highway to the Whistler ski resort. Part of the issue is the coming Olympics. Part is the cheapness of the province and its PPP partners (Public-Private Partnerships, in which the public helps business turn our infrastructure into a profit centre) in not being willing to pay for a tunnel. Krawczyk was born in 1928, so she is no spring chicken, but as she says in this book,
...the closer one gets to the natural world, the less one fears death. ... However, if one loses one's fear of death one naturally becomes a rebel.
Clayoquot is the story of Krawczyk's radicalization. The book intercuts two different timelines: a "present" story about her life in a cabin at Clayoquot Sound and how that led to her becoming an activist for old-growth forests, and a biographical narrative. The latter starts with her Catholic Cajun girlhood in a close-knit Louisiana community; she got cold-shouldered out of there when she refused to oppose racial integration. After that she did things like get married a few times, have kids, work. She met feminists and other progressive people and thought about their ideas. You can see that she was not just a natural "aginner" but gradually found her way to a different way of thinking, relating, and acting on the basis of experience.
When I first started reading, I was a little put off by all the misspellings, but after a while I decided it wasn't the mark of a poor author, but a literally poor publisher who wouldn't spring for proofreading. The book is physically very nicely published, though; it's a trade paperback with good paper, decent-sized type, and an attractive stiff cover that has built-in flaps you can use to mark your place.
The shape of the book's writing is skillful: her characterizations are pithy and empathetic; dramatic events are recounted, but not milked for length; the intercutting of different time periods adds a lot of suspense, and simultaneously covers for the abandon with which she jumps from one pivotal event in her life to another. As we read, we find out that she taught herself to be a professional writer, and that her early work was for "true confessions" magazines (a genre I must confess I consumed avidly in my early teens).
I haven't finished the book yet, I'm reading it slowly and savouring it. One of the early scenes is of a mass campout against old-growth forest logging, and it reminds me of a similar scene in Jeannette Armstrong's Whispering in Shadows (see my review in the 2006 section of this blog). Armstrong is a First Nations woman, and Krawczyk writes about not talking with the indigenous people then, because she didn't know what to ask. Obviously, she recovered from this reticence later.
At Eagle Ridge Bluffs, she was arrested along with respected Aboriginal Elder Harriet Nahanee. Harriet died February 24 2007 at age 71, of an illness that went untreated for the two weeks she was forced to serve in jail for blocking the road development. The picture to the right is from an article about the two of them and their cause that appeared in the online newspaper The Tyee in March of 2007.(Right, Betty Krawczyk; centre, Harriet Nahanee. Photo by C. Grabowski)
Monday, June 04, 2007
Six Weeks to Toxic
by Louisa McCormack (Toronto: Key Porter Books, Ltd., 2006)
It alarms me that so many interesting novels by women can be picked up for a song at the Vancouver Public Library. It delights me, but it alarms me, because this means the books have been de-accessioned and are no longer circulating from the library shelves. However, I've checked the online catalogue, and this one, at least, can still be requested - there are three copies available.
I bought it mainly because the author has worked for CBC Radio One, and I love CBC Radio One, it's one of the best things about living in Canada. (Of course, if you don't live in Canada you can still listen online.) According to producers I've heard explaining this, each CBC program has a carefully outlined plot structure, with planned delights at fixed points on the show's clock. As a formula, it works. Their shows also tend to have mysterious titles (like DNTO, which was recently replaced by Q), and so Six Weeks to Toxic seemed promising.
Actually, when I started reading it I was a little shocked - there was a lot of language that even in Canada you might not want to be reading out on the radio. Canadians are more insulted by violence and intolerance in media than USAns and less by sex and excretion, but the CBC recently got reprimanded by the CRTC, for allowing the word fuck to air, in a violent if literary context, at a time when children were likely to be listening.
In Six Weeks to Toxic, two close female friends expose a lot about their bodily functions and sex experiences, and even write a faux magazine for each other's enjoyment only, with the telling title of Gash.
In my day, we did all that stuff, and sometimes wrote about it, but we were always conscious that we were being transgressive. In this writing, acts committed with food are more blatantly transgressive than those committed with sex.
Another thing that shocked me was thinking "oh, so this is chick lit and I'm reading it!" There were a lot of descriptions of clothes and men and envy of others' physical attributes. What kept me going through this part was that the heroine is a foley artist - a person who makes the sound effects that accompany movies, and one of the most interesting careers to read about. Did you know that you can make the clinking sound of a knight's chain mail clothing by manipulating the links of a key chain?
The other thing that kept me reading was the teaser description in teeny letters on the book's cover: "Women break up with men all the time. But there are no rules for breaking up with your best friend..." Anyone who has ever had a friendship that became oppressive can't help but be intrigued by that story line.
The book is short, and I don't want to give too much away, but I will say that my opinion of the heroine steadily improved throughout the book, and the boyfriend and his dog both grew endearing as well. Plus, everyone in this culture McCormack depicts has a tongue-in-cheek way with words that is so not baby-Boomer-earnestness that it's refreshing. So, if you're in Vancouver and you have a VPL card, you might want to check this out.
It alarms me that so many interesting novels by women can be picked up for a song at the Vancouver Public Library. It delights me, but it alarms me, because this means the books have been de-accessioned and are no longer circulating from the library shelves. However, I've checked the online catalogue, and this one, at least, can still be requested - there are three copies available.
I bought it mainly because the author has worked for CBC Radio One, and I love CBC Radio One, it's one of the best things about living in Canada. (Of course, if you don't live in Canada you can still listen online.) According to producers I've heard explaining this, each CBC program has a carefully outlined plot structure, with planned delights at fixed points on the show's clock. As a formula, it works. Their shows also tend to have mysterious titles (like DNTO, which was recently replaced by Q), and so Six Weeks to Toxic seemed promising.
Actually, when I started reading it I was a little shocked - there was a lot of language that even in Canada you might not want to be reading out on the radio. Canadians are more insulted by violence and intolerance in media than USAns and less by sex and excretion, but the CBC recently got reprimanded by the CRTC, for allowing the word fuck to air, in a violent if literary context, at a time when children were likely to be listening.
In Six Weeks to Toxic, two close female friends expose a lot about their bodily functions and sex experiences, and even write a faux magazine for each other's enjoyment only, with the telling title of Gash.
In my day, we did all that stuff, and sometimes wrote about it, but we were always conscious that we were being transgressive. In this writing, acts committed with food are more blatantly transgressive than those committed with sex.
Another thing that shocked me was thinking "oh, so this is chick lit and I'm reading it!" There were a lot of descriptions of clothes and men and envy of others' physical attributes. What kept me going through this part was that the heroine is a foley artist - a person who makes the sound effects that accompany movies, and one of the most interesting careers to read about. Did you know that you can make the clinking sound of a knight's chain mail clothing by manipulating the links of a key chain?
The other thing that kept me reading was the teaser description in teeny letters on the book's cover: "Women break up with men all the time. But there are no rules for breaking up with your best friend..." Anyone who has ever had a friendship that became oppressive can't help but be intrigued by that story line.The book is short, and I don't want to give too much away, but I will say that my opinion of the heroine steadily improved throughout the book, and the boyfriend and his dog both grew endearing as well. Plus, everyone in this culture McCormack depicts has a tongue-in-cheek way with words that is so not baby-Boomer-earnestness that it's refreshing. So, if you're in Vancouver and you have a VPL card, you might want to check this out.
Sunday, June 03, 2007
Loose Theatre: Memoirs of a Guerrilla Theatre Activist
by Margaretta D'Arcy (Trafford Publishing: Victoria BC, Canada; Crewe, Cheshire, London, 2005)
Margaretta D'Arcy is a well known Irish playwright, one of the few women ever to receive the Cnuas, a lifetime Arts Council income grant. She talks about her plays and about the award (and the politics of the award) in this book, but it is much more devoted to the theatre of activism in which she has long engaged. Causes to which she has lent this talent include, among others: labour rights, Irish nationalism, peace, ending the US Cruise Missile presence on Greenham Common in England, the Measuring and Counting of Women's Unwaged Work, international community radio, Wages for Housework, and the annual Women's Strike.
Having known and admired Margaretta for quite a few years, I was very interested in Part One of the book, which tells about her peculiar upbringing. She had an Irish Catholic former freedom-fighter for a father and a Russian Jewish doctor for a mother. As she was born in 1934, the social milieu of the time made emphasizing the Catholic angle less conspicuous, and she and her sisters were sent to Catholic boarding school. There, she discovered the impressive power of the church's theatricality, which created in her a fervent if temporary religiosity.
As a young woman, Margaretta became an actress and began to hang with theatrical types.
She met and eventually married and had offspring with playwright John Arden, and has collaborated with him on many plays and radio dramas of a political nature. In this book, she writes of witnessing the emergence of a new, comparatively wild and flexible, sort of theatre, of which she and John were among the well known practitioners.
One of the largest sections of this book covers Margaretta's years of involvement with the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camps.
These camps (which were named for the different-coloured gates of the base) had the aim of reclaiming commons land in England that had been confiscated for a US cruise missile base. While very committed and spending a lot of time there, Margaretta also retained her inbred outsider stance throughout, and this allows her to honestly portray the factionalism, moods, and snitty behaviours of Peace Camp participants and their allies, while at the same time crediting their courage, stubbornness in the face of intimidation (and even death), and their almost unbelievable final success. The book is composed partly of new writing but also greatly, especially in this section, of edited selections from diaries and letters and fliers, raw hunks of the mood from the actual days of D'Arcy's life.
Margaretta D'Arcy has written other books, including Tell Them Everything, Awkward Corners (with John Arden), and Galway's Pirate Women: a global trawl. You can find D'Arcy's books and videos as well as streaming audio from her station, Radio Pirate Woman, on her website http://www.margarettadarcy.com/.
-- Frieda Werden
Margaretta D'Arcy is a well known Irish playwright, one of the few women ever to receive the Cnuas, a lifetime Arts Council income grant. She talks about her plays and about the award (and the politics of the award) in this book, but it is much more devoted to the theatre of activism in which she has long engaged. Causes to which she has lent this talent include, among others: labour rights, Irish nationalism, peace, ending the US Cruise Missile presence on Greenham Common in England, the Measuring and Counting of Women's Unwaged Work, international community radio, Wages for Housework, and the annual Women's Strike.
Having known and admired Margaretta for quite a few years, I was very interested in Part One of the book, which tells about her peculiar upbringing. She had an Irish Catholic former freedom-fighter for a father and a Russian Jewish doctor for a mother. As she was born in 1934, the social milieu of the time made emphasizing the Catholic angle less conspicuous, and she and her sisters were sent to Catholic boarding school. There, she discovered the impressive power of the church's theatricality, which created in her a fervent if temporary religiosity.
As a young woman, Margaretta became an actress and began to hang with theatrical types.
She met and eventually married and had offspring with playwright John Arden, and has collaborated with him on many plays and radio dramas of a political nature. In this book, she writes of witnessing the emergence of a new, comparatively wild and flexible, sort of theatre, of which she and John were among the well known practitioners.One of the largest sections of this book covers Margaretta's years of involvement with the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camps.
These camps (which were named for the different-coloured gates of the base) had the aim of reclaiming commons land in England that had been confiscated for a US cruise missile base. While very committed and spending a lot of time there, Margaretta also retained her inbred outsider stance throughout, and this allows her to honestly portray the factionalism, moods, and snitty behaviours of Peace Camp participants and their allies, while at the same time crediting their courage, stubbornness in the face of intimidation (and even death), and their almost unbelievable final success. The book is composed partly of new writing but also greatly, especially in this section, of edited selections from diaries and letters and fliers, raw hunks of the mood from the actual days of D'Arcy's life.Margaretta D'Arcy has written other books, including Tell Them Everything, Awkward Corners (with John Arden), and Galway's Pirate Women: a global trawl. You can find D'Arcy's books and videos as well as streaming audio from her station, Radio Pirate Woman, on her website http://www.margarettadarcy.com/.
-- Frieda Werden
Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President
by Jill Norgren
(New York: New York University Press, 2007)
(Guest review by Jo Freeman)
Belva Lockwood was an ambitious women, and Belva Lockwood is an ambitious book.
Famous in her day for many "firsts," the US Postal service put her face on a stamp in 1986. Because her papers were largely destroyed by her grandson after her death in 1917, to write this biography Norgren had to track Lockwood's "footprints" through newspapers, legal archives, and letters sent to others that found their way into family files. This took a prodigious amount of work over many years. The result is worth the wait.
Although best known for running for President in 1884 and 1888, Lockwood was one of the pioneers who broke the barriers to women practicing law. She was the second woman admitted to the bar in the District of Columbia and the first admitted to practice before the U. S. Supreme Court. Active for suffrage, peace, temperance and other causes, she was constantly pushing the boundaries of the possible.
Born on October 24, 1830, in upper New York state, Belva Ann Bennett had an early appetite for education. At the age of 14 she taught in a rural school, chafing that she was paid half the salary of her male counterpart. She would eventually get a degree from a Methodist seminary for women and a law degree from National University Law School but each of these required surmounting obstacles created by her sex and her need to support herself.
Her seminary education and early career as a teacher -- a common but poorly paid position for a woman -- might not have been possible had she not been widowed at age 22. Teaching sharpened her ambition. Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Belva sent her 16-year-old daughter to be educated at her own alma mater and set off to Washington D.C. in search of opportunity. She found it as "Washington's Lady Lawyer" after a long and rocky trek to her law degree and admission to various bars. In the meantime she earned her living as a rental agent, newspaper correspondent and sales representative, and lecturer.
Drawn to politics, Belva traveled the South in 1872 as a paid campaigner for Horace Greeley. In May of that year the notorious Victoria Claflin Woodhull had herself nominated for President at a convention she called for that purpose, but did little more. How Lockwood came to run for President in 1884 on the same "Equal Rights Party" ticket are "colored by ego and memory." Suffice it to say that men ridiculed her and some prominent Suffrage leaders strongly disapproved. But Lockwood did what Woodhull did not do and ran a full campaign.
Lockwood was very pleased with her efforts. Her campaign generated enormous publicity, opportunities to travel, large audiences who paid to hear her speak, and almost five thousand votes. She even made a small profit. Success prompted her to try again in 1888 but this campaign produced more disapproval and less satisfaction.
Norgren repeatedly points out Lockwood's flair for self-promotion, of which her Presidential campaign was just one example. That talent not only made her a prominent figure in her lifetime but left the newspaper stories which made her biography possible. Lockwood's love of publicity was merged with genuine devotion to several causes, making it difficult to identify her motivations.
Despite her ardor for universal suffrage, she never found a niche for herself in the Suffrage Movement. Instead she became a fixture in the peace movement and a spokeswoman for the Universal Peace Union. She was a frequent delegate to conferences urging peace and arbitration as the solution to conflict. She spoke up for popular causes such as temperance and unpopular causes such as the Mormons.
Belva married twice, but spent most of her life as a widow – the best situation for an educated woman during an era when wives were subject to their husbands and spinsters seen as less than full women. Her first husband died four and a half years after their marriage, leaving behind the daughter who would remain Belva's companion until an early death at age 44. In 1868 she married Ezekiel Lockwood, an elderly dentist, becoming a widow for the second time nine years later. Their only child died at 18 months.
Family was very important to Belva. In 1877 she bought a large house on F St. where she housed her law practice, her daughter, and various members of her extended household. Spare rooms were rented out. The day-to-day law practice of mostly pension and land claims was handled by her daughter and other relatives. Belva was the "rainmaker" for the family firm, attracting clients through her travels and lectures. She wrote the briefs and conducted the trials for the occasional high profile case. After her daughter died, her law practice disintegrated.
By the time she died at age 86, Lockwood's star had long since faded. Her house was sold to pay her debts. Her only heir shipped her papers to a pulp mill. She had lived through a vast transformation of her society but her fondest goals were yet to be realized. She still could not vote. Her country had just voted to go to war and the prohibition amendment had not yet passed. Much more time would pass before her life and her dreams would be celebrated.
This book is a good read. It provides an enjoyable and enlightening narration of US history and women's history as well as the history of a life.
--Jo Freeman
Jo Freeman is a political scientist and the author of many books and articles about women. You can find out more about her on her website
http://www.JoFreeman.com
Jo Freeman's guest review of Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would be President was originally posted to Senior Women Web
http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/freeman/articlesFreemanBelva.html
(New York: New York University Press, 2007)
(Guest review by Jo Freeman)
Belva Lockwood was an ambitious women, and Belva Lockwood is an ambitious book.
Famous in her day for many "firsts," the US Postal service put her face on a stamp in 1986. Because her papers were largely destroyed by her grandson after her death in 1917, to write this biography Norgren had to track Lockwood's "footprints" through newspapers, legal archives, and letters sent to others that found their way into family files. This took a prodigious amount of work over many years. The result is worth the wait.
Although best known for running for President in 1884 and 1888, Lockwood was one of the pioneers who broke the barriers to women practicing law. She was the second woman admitted to the bar in the District of Columbia and the first admitted to practice before the U. S. Supreme Court. Active for suffrage, peace, temperance and other causes, she was constantly pushing the boundaries of the possible.
Born on October 24, 1830, in upper New York state, Belva Ann Bennett had an early appetite for education. At the age of 14 she taught in a rural school, chafing that she was paid half the salary of her male counterpart. She would eventually get a degree from a Methodist seminary for women and a law degree from National University Law School but each of these required surmounting obstacles created by her sex and her need to support herself.
Her seminary education and early career as a teacher -- a common but poorly paid position for a woman -- might not have been possible had she not been widowed at age 22. Teaching sharpened her ambition. Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Belva sent her 16-year-old daughter to be educated at her own alma mater and set off to Washington D.C. in search of opportunity. She found it as "Washington's Lady Lawyer" after a long and rocky trek to her law degree and admission to various bars. In the meantime she earned her living as a rental agent, newspaper correspondent and sales representative, and lecturer.
Drawn to politics, Belva traveled the South in 1872 as a paid campaigner for Horace Greeley. In May of that year the notorious Victoria Claflin Woodhull had herself nominated for President at a convention she called for that purpose, but did little more. How Lockwood came to run for President in 1884 on the same "Equal Rights Party" ticket are "colored by ego and memory." Suffice it to say that men ridiculed her and some prominent Suffrage leaders strongly disapproved. But Lockwood did what Woodhull did not do and ran a full campaign.
Lockwood was very pleased with her efforts. Her campaign generated enormous publicity, opportunities to travel, large audiences who paid to hear her speak, and almost five thousand votes. She even made a small profit. Success prompted her to try again in 1888 but this campaign produced more disapproval and less satisfaction.
Norgren repeatedly points out Lockwood's flair for self-promotion, of which her Presidential campaign was just one example. That talent not only made her a prominent figure in her lifetime but left the newspaper stories which made her biography possible. Lockwood's love of publicity was merged with genuine devotion to several causes, making it difficult to identify her motivations.
Despite her ardor for universal suffrage, she never found a niche for herself in the Suffrage Movement. Instead she became a fixture in the peace movement and a spokeswoman for the Universal Peace Union. She was a frequent delegate to conferences urging peace and arbitration as the solution to conflict. She spoke up for popular causes such as temperance and unpopular causes such as the Mormons.
Belva married twice, but spent most of her life as a widow – the best situation for an educated woman during an era when wives were subject to their husbands and spinsters seen as less than full women. Her first husband died four and a half years after their marriage, leaving behind the daughter who would remain Belva's companion until an early death at age 44. In 1868 she married Ezekiel Lockwood, an elderly dentist, becoming a widow for the second time nine years later. Their only child died at 18 months.
Family was very important to Belva. In 1877 she bought a large house on F St. where she housed her law practice, her daughter, and various members of her extended household. Spare rooms were rented out. The day-to-day law practice of mostly pension and land claims was handled by her daughter and other relatives. Belva was the "rainmaker" for the family firm, attracting clients through her travels and lectures. She wrote the briefs and conducted the trials for the occasional high profile case. After her daughter died, her law practice disintegrated.
By the time she died at age 86, Lockwood's star had long since faded. Her house was sold to pay her debts. Her only heir shipped her papers to a pulp mill. She had lived through a vast transformation of her society but her fondest goals were yet to be realized. She still could not vote. Her country had just voted to go to war and the prohibition amendment had not yet passed. Much more time would pass before her life and her dreams would be celebrated.
This book is a good read. It provides an enjoyable and enlightening narration of US history and women's history as well as the history of a life.
--Jo Freeman
Jo Freeman is a political scientist and the author of many books and articles about women. You can find out more about her on her website http://www.JoFreeman.com
Jo Freeman's guest review of Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would be President was originally posted to Senior Women Web
http://www.seniorwomen.com/articles/freeman/articlesFreemanBelva.html
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Ms. Magazine
If you haven't been reading or subscribing to Ms Magazine lately, you should give it another try. Since being taken under the Feminist Majority umbrella, it has developed into a women's news magazine with sharp reporting and layout. I actually read it now. For quite some time I subscribed or bought it on the newsstand out of loyalty to the movement, but then when I'd look at it my eyes would just glaze over. After the heady days of its debut years in the early 1970s, its editorial content was reportedly held in check by, at various times: the will of advertisers, being purchased by a male publisher, and being really short of dough. For years it also had a boring and hard-to-read layout. And also perhaps there was an editorial board somewhere that kept saying "let's not step on anybody's toes in the women's movement." Often there was a bit of a hagiographic feel.
The Feminist Majority < www.feminist.org >, a major US feminist group headed by former NOW President Ellie Smeal, has been a long time building a broad-based constituency with a lot of emphasis on enrolling youth, and has also worked very hard to raise money to support a substantial operation. Their foregrounded agenda has been a funny patchwork of issues, which I suppose were the ones they could best raise money around, including getting the US to legalize RU-486 (the French abortion pill), support for women in Afghanistan, analyzing the gender gap in US elections, feminist internships for college women, and, curiously, women and policing. They also have long had an online news section of their website. Smeal really throws herself and her organization wholeheartedly behind their major activities, and they have a good track record. They were the creators of the very successful Feminist Expo '96 for Women's Empowerment and the followup Feminist Expo 2000, events that showcased the variety and activity of the US women's movement.
Another thing about FemMaj is that they are based in the Washington DC area instead of New York where Ms was started, and because of that placement they are very active in the National Council of Women's Organizations. NCWO is a coalition of both membership organizations and research groups that specialize in women's issues. < www.womensorganizations.org >
FemMaj also has links to wealthy Hollywood feminists.
Apparently FemMaj can now afford to support this slick quarterly print publication whose only ads are for nonprofit organizations, and can pay reporters and editors for current analytical stuff. Adopting the well-known Ms. instead of starting a new publication was a stroke of genius, and after a hesitant beginning, they are really putting a new and I think more exciting spin on it. I'm sure they are counting on subscriptions to help pay for it of course, and I do plan to renew. They also now involve Ms. in political actions, like delivering a "We Had Abortions" petition to the US Congress.
For more on Ms try this link (which includes daily news updates):
www.msmagazine.com
F.W.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Itsuka
by Joy Kogawa (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1992)
This is one of the most exciting political novels I have read.
Joy Kogawa is beloved by Canadian readers for her first novel Obasan (1981), which tells the story of a young Japanese Canadian girl, Naomi, caught up in the dispossession, relocation and scattering of Canada's Japanese community during World War II. The titular Obasan is Naomi's eldest aunt, an issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) who cares for Naomi and her brother Stephen through the terrible time. Kogawa later wrote a children's book based on these experiences called Naomi's Road (1986), which was made into a short opera and toured to schools in British Columbia by the Vancouver Opera. Kogawa is also a poet - which shows in the vivid and accurate language of her fiction.
This second novel begins when a painfully introverted Naomi, now in her forties, finally leaves the prairie and her job teaching English in a rural Bible college, and arrives in Toronto, to live with a very different relative - Aunt Emily.
The title Itsuka is a Japanese word for someday. Most of the beginning of the novel is about what happened to Naomi and Stephen after the end of the previous book - the someday of a child's adulthood. Among Kogawa's insights there are very penetrating lines about rural Christian fundamentalism and naturally something about prejudice directed at children isolated from most of the members of their own race and culture.
The remainder of the novel is primarily about struggle within the Japanese community over whether to ask the Canadian government for reparations for what was taken from them, and then how to manage the process among themselves. The process Kogawa depicts must obviously have been built on close observation of her community; however, the nature of the struggle, is much like that in many emerging groups. Beginning with resistance to autocracy, democratic organization emerges within the community; and during the process of struggle, leaders emerge and pride and a sense of community identity come to be.
There is an article about Kogawa in the Wikipedia <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Kogawa > that mentions that Itsuka has been re-written, and re-titled with the name of the fictional aunt, Emily Kato(2005). However, Itsuka is still in circulation at the Vancouver Public Library. There is also a biography page about Kogawa online: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/kogawa_joy_nakayama.html . Here's a website with interesting study notes about the relationships of the people in her books: http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/canada/kogawa.html (it's also where I borrowed the photo, which has been de-linked from its original source). Finally, there's this page devoted to the campaign to buy and save the Kogawas' original house in Vancouver: http://www.kogawahouse.com/
--Frieda Werden
This is one of the most exciting political novels I have read.
Joy Kogawa is beloved by Canadian readers for her first novel Obasan (1981), which tells the story of a young Japanese Canadian girl, Naomi, caught up in the dispossession, relocation and scattering of Canada's Japanese community during World War II. The titular Obasan is Naomi's eldest aunt, an issei (first-generation Japanese immigrant) who cares for Naomi and her brother Stephen through the terrible time. Kogawa later wrote a children's book based on these experiences called Naomi's Road (1986), which was made into a short opera and toured to schools in British Columbia by the Vancouver Opera. Kogawa is also a poet - which shows in the vivid and accurate language of her fiction.
This second novel begins when a painfully introverted Naomi, now in her forties, finally leaves the prairie and her job teaching English in a rural Bible college, and arrives in Toronto, to live with a very different relative - Aunt Emily.
The title Itsuka is a Japanese word for someday. Most of the beginning of the novel is about what happened to Naomi and Stephen after the end of the previous book - the someday of a child's adulthood. Among Kogawa's insights there are very penetrating lines about rural Christian fundamentalism and naturally something about prejudice directed at children isolated from most of the members of their own race and culture.
The remainder of the novel is primarily about struggle within the Japanese community over whether to ask the Canadian government for reparations for what was taken from them, and then how to manage the process among themselves. The process Kogawa depicts must obviously have been built on close observation of her community; however, the nature of the struggle, is much like that in many emerging groups. Beginning with resistance to autocracy, democratic organization emerges within the community; and during the process of struggle, leaders emerge and pride and a sense of community identity come to be.
There is an article about Kogawa in the Wikipedia <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Kogawa > that mentions that Itsuka has been re-written, and re-titled with the name of the fictional aunt, Emily Kato(2005). However, Itsuka is still in circulation at the Vancouver Public Library. There is also a biography page about Kogawa online: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/Bios/entries/kogawa_joy_nakayama.html . Here's a website with interesting study notes about the relationships of the people in her books: http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/canada/kogawa.html (it's also where I borrowed the photo, which has been de-linked from its original source). Finally, there's this page devoted to the campaign to buy and save the Kogawas' original house in Vancouver: http://www.kogawahouse.com/--Frieda Werden
Friday, December 29, 2006
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
by Barbara Ehrenreich (NY: Metropolitan Books, 2005)
[Guest review by Elayne Clift]
I’m old enough to remember “the man in the gray flannel suit” whose future was assured as long as he slogged off to an office cubicle every day, loyal to the corporation that rewarded his fealty with a proverbial gold watch. But I’m also young enough to be intimately aware of the new corporate culture depressingly described by Barbara Ehrenreich in Bait and Switch.
In her 2005 book, Ehrenreich lays out the reality of a world in which unemployment, underemployment and “anxious employment” prevail among America’s white-collar, shrinking middle-class. Ehrenreich went underground (as she did in Nickel and Dimed) to research the plight of professionals who have been downsized, outsourced, and otherwise displaced, often because they excel at their jobs, thereby commanding higher salaries and benefits. She describes a world in which competent, formerly successful people sink further into the morass of the modern work world, a world in which they have become disposable.
I could have been one of her research subjects. Not once but three times over the course of my midlife career I was pushed out of an organization or institution for which I’d performed well and to which I felt deeply committed. In my case it wasn’t because I made buckets of money; it was that I threatened someone above me, usually for truthtelling, which can morph into the perception of disloyalty, when in fact it is exactly the opposite. In each case, I spent more time than I care to remember job-searching, becoming despondent, and belittling myself in the name of being “realistic.” The first time it happened I was unemployed for three years. I grew morbidly depressed. Then I wrote an article about the experience in which I compared prolonged unemployment to three disease processes: First, the unemployed are treated as if they have a communicable disease. Stay away or you might catch it! Given enough time the long-term unemployed experience Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. PTSD-like nightmares flare up in which you go over ad nauseam what went wrong. Finally, one begins to experience the death and dying of his or her professional persona. First articulated by Elizabeth Kubler Ross for the terminally ill, the stages include denial, anger, bargaining (with God), depression and acceptance. I share this because I understand what people experience when subjected to the harsh consequences of today’s economic reality. But enough about me.
What Ehrenreich has put her finger on is the fact that the middle class in America is in trouble and may be disappearing. Economists have fancy terms for discussing the phenomenon. They talk about “income volatility”and something called the “knowledge economy.” Layoffs become“downsizing” or “outsourcing.” In an article for The Nation (11/6/06), Ehrenreich shares these compelling facts: Those who try to compete by earning graduate degrees often find themselves in debt in excess of $40,000 before they get started. And starting salaries are insufficient to cover healthcare, housing and energy costs. At the same time, benefits are shrinking rapidly. More than 20 percent of working college graduates [in the US] now have no health insurance, up from 17 percent five yearsago. “This is the new world of the middle-class,” Ehrenreich writes, “haunted by debt, stalked by layoffs, pinched by vanishing pensions and health benefits, and forced into ever more contingent forms of work as ‘real’ jobs give way to benefit-free contract work.” The middle class, she says, now “hover just inches above the working poor.”
That’s why Ehrenreich and other activists have formed United Professionals < www.unitedprofessionals.org >. Modeled on AARP [the American Association or Retired Persons] and with start-up funds in hand, the membership organization has three main goals: community building to combat the stigma attached to unemployment; advocacy on issues such as universal health care and social security regulations; and services like legal advice. Says Ehrenreich, “By focusing on the troubled middle class, we help make the point that poverty, far from being a matter of ‘bad choices’ or character flaws, can happen to any of us.”
Reading Ehrenreich’s important if upsetting book reminded me of a young woman I met recently. Young and vibrant, she was a voluntary “commercial sex worker.” In other words, a prostitute. A graduate of one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country and now working on a master’s degree in psychology, this is what she told me: “I did all the right things. I excelled at the best schools, networked till I was blue in the face, dressed for success for hundreds of interviews. But I couldn’t get a job. So I went straight to the big boys with the big bucks. Now a big part of my job is eating a lot of steak and shrimp.” What do you say to a smart, energetic, entrepreneurial twenty-three year old woman who’s already lost hope of attaining dignified work? I wish when I met her I’d known about United Professionals. It might at least have been a start.
--by Elayne Clift
----------------
Elayne Clift is the author of many books. Find descriptions of them and a bio of Elayne at: http://www.sover.net/~eclift/
Thursday, December 14, 2006
Women and Children First
by Michele Landsberg (Markham, Ontario, Canada: Penguin Books, 1983)
[Review by Frieda Werden]
As a fairly recent immigrant to Canada (2002), I have catching up to do about Canada's feminist history. This book helped a lot. Michele Landsberg was a columnist for a number of newspapers, notably the Toronto Star, and also articles editor of Chatelaine magazine for seven years. ( Chatelaine, according to Canadian feminist media activist Judy Rebick, was a mainstream magazine but also so feminist that when US founding feminist Betty Friedan was trying to place some excerpts from her then-forthcoming book The Feminine Mystique, Chatelaine rejected it as being too old hat. )
In the Introduction, Landsberg describes herself as "neither a radical nor a traditionalist... a committed feminist who is also a monogamous wife and devoted mother." In those roles alone, she appears to have had quite an impact: her husband is Stephen Lewis, who is currently [2006] advocating for a much more powerful and better-funded organization for women at the United Nations; one of her three children, Avi Lewis, is married to and works with Naomi Klein (whose own mother, Bonnie Klein, made the anti-pornography film Not a Love Story); Landsberg and Lewis's two daughters, Ilana and Jenny, are both described as feminist in an article on the Stephen Lewis Foundation website ( http://www.stephenlewisfoundation.org/news_item.cfm?news=210 ) .
Women and Children First was my travel book on a recent trip to Jordan, and it made a big impact on me. For one thing, Landsberg advocates passionately on behalf of maternal leave, breastfeeding, and childcare. In light of the recent abolishment of the very new Canadian national childcare plan by the recently-installed Conservative government, this reading gave me a huge pang for more than 23 years of feminist effort and advocacy for the childcare cause in Canada -- finally come to fruition and then cruelly set back by Bush-wanna-be Stephen Harper and his Republican clones.
The essay on breastfeeding evokes a kind of sensuous motherhood rarely seen in print [see my previous blog entry on Sharon Olds, for another author with similar sensibility], but it isn't in the least sentimental. Landsberg explains that as infants are "dependent, with a ferocity of need that non-parents simply can't imagine, an immediate response from the mother is the barest minimum of courtesy." In another paragraph about negative responses to breastfeeding in public, she writes,
- It's hard for new mothers to understand that mentality which associates loving nurture with obscene sexual display. But there it is. Two warring views of the world. Which shall prevail? The babies , of course, must have right of way.
I really like it about Landsberg that she keeps building bridges between the personal world and the political world. We did used to say that "the personal is political" -- and it still is.
Each chapter in this book consists of a group of Landsberg's columns from the Toronto Star, sewn together by later-written integuments. A particularly trenchant chapter is called "Our Bodies, Men's Rules." It includes columns on
- an all-female mental women's mental health clinic
- the reality of menstrual cramps (it's not "all in your head") and a new treatment using anti-prostaglandin drugs
- toxic shock syndrome and the shocking revelation that "feminine hygiene products," including tampons, required no government testing or labeling (unlike condoms)
and goes on to deliver a smashing indictment of the encroachments of anti-abortion extremists, and a caring view of women's right and necessity to make their own decisions about their bodies.
Another chapter takes on a myth that is still being pushed in major newspapers of Canada (and the US) today -- the idea that somehow there is a conflict going on between feminists and mothers. Landsberg writes
- many women I know manage to combine feminism and motherhood in a comfortably pragmatic blend. They are aware that the price of motherhood is very high, and feel that the cost should be shared more democratically than it is now. Feminists have been among those who fought for more humane childbirth, maternity pay, day care, neighbourhood support centres, and a heightened social empathy for the tasks of parenthood... less singling out of mothers when things go wrong.
If you want to know the history of the sexual equality clause in the Canadian constitution, you can find it in here, too. As all equality-seeking activity has just been removed by the Conservatives from the mandate of Status of Women Canada, this, too, is very current and may help us in winning the next round.
Saturday, June 24, 2006
Bird-Eyes
by Madelyn Arnold (NY: St. Martin's Press, 1988)
In 1964, when I was 17, I belonged to the Social Science Club at my high school. Our club had a field trip to the "State Hospital" in central North Carolina, and saw how humans were sequestered and / or warehoused because of emotional, mental, and also physical impairments. That's the same year, and the same country, the same kind of institution, as the setting of this book.
The reader of Bird-Eyes, however, is not looking through the eyes of a visitor. The portrait of the place, the people, and the mentality of both inmates and their keepers, is narrated from inside a very keen and mostly lucid 16-year-old female character, Latisha, who has been sentenced to confinement for incorrigibility. From her perspective, the humanity, ignorance and deficiencies of psychiatrist and staff are glaringly recorded with their effects, and the process of institutionalization of the residents is observed from the inside out. The level of insight is very very striking, and outshines even the characters and the plot.
The most interesting character aside from the narrator is a deaf woman admitted for depression after her husband's death. Unchecked institutional ignorance isolates her profoundly, and puts her under tremendous emotional pressure. Her friendship with Latisha and their guarded use of sign language is a major interest in the book.
Most of what happens in Bird-Eyes seems all too believable. People under institutional care are very varied, and their dynamics are hard to control, so a lot of drugs and crude behaviour modification get applied. The needs and personalities of the care-givers are also a wild card in the mix. Everyone is looking for and using loopholes in the system if they can. The wealthiest are the most likely to re-surface. The descriptions of the uses and results of shock treatment jibe all too well with what I have observed in the lives of friends who accepted this prescription, and with expert testimony like that of Dr. Bonnie Burstow [hear her talk on this at www.wings.org in the archives page]. While mental health institutions in the US and Canada have now divested themselves of most of their patients, and while there have been a few surprisingly good advances in drug treatment, notably for schizophrenia, for the most part, psychiatry and mental health care are still largely blundering and too available as careers for self-deceptive and abusive folks.
I am not certain if this book is autobiographical in its origins. It seems unlikely that one who had not been there could have written it, though, unless with the collaboration of someone who had been there at least. It comes across as a strong voice from the inside that should be heard.
I see that this book was a Lambda Award winner for best first novel. These prizes are for books about lesbians and gays, but the lesbian elements in this book are not dominant over the broader social insights.
Bird-Eyes is the first of two novels (and an essay collection) by Madelyn Arnold. She also seems to have a new novel in the works, Divided by One. And, she has a column called "Not Thinking Straight" in the Seattle Gay News, to which she has contributed since 1975. Some of her columns (complete with smiling photo) are online, including this one from last year, about suicide: http://www.sgn.org/sgnnews12/page44.cfm.
In 1964, when I was 17, I belonged to the Social Science Club at my high school. Our club had a field trip to the "State Hospital" in central North Carolina, and saw how humans were sequestered and / or warehoused because of emotional, mental, and also physical impairments. That's the same year, and the same country, the same kind of institution, as the setting of this book.
The reader of Bird-Eyes, however, is not looking through the eyes of a visitor. The portrait of the place, the people, and the mentality of both inmates and their keepers, is narrated from inside a very keen and mostly lucid 16-year-old female character, Latisha, who has been sentenced to confinement for incorrigibility. From her perspective, the humanity, ignorance and deficiencies of psychiatrist and staff are glaringly recorded with their effects, and the process of institutionalization of the residents is observed from the inside out. The level of insight is very very striking, and outshines even the characters and the plot.
The most interesting character aside from the narrator is a deaf woman admitted for depression after her husband's death. Unchecked institutional ignorance isolates her profoundly, and puts her under tremendous emotional pressure. Her friendship with Latisha and their guarded use of sign language is a major interest in the book.
Most of what happens in Bird-Eyes seems all too believable. People under institutional care are very varied, and their dynamics are hard to control, so a lot of drugs and crude behaviour modification get applied. The needs and personalities of the care-givers are also a wild card in the mix. Everyone is looking for and using loopholes in the system if they can. The wealthiest are the most likely to re-surface. The descriptions of the uses and results of shock treatment jibe all too well with what I have observed in the lives of friends who accepted this prescription, and with expert testimony like that of Dr. Bonnie Burstow [hear her talk on this at www.wings.org in the archives page]. While mental health institutions in the US and Canada have now divested themselves of most of their patients, and while there have been a few surprisingly good advances in drug treatment, notably for schizophrenia, for the most part, psychiatry and mental health care are still largely blundering and too available as careers for self-deceptive and abusive folks.
I am not certain if this book is autobiographical in its origins. It seems unlikely that one who had not been there could have written it, though, unless with the collaboration of someone who had been there at least. It comes across as a strong voice from the inside that should be heard.
I see that this book was a Lambda Award winner for best first novel. These prizes are for books about lesbians and gays, but the lesbian elements in this book are not dominant over the broader social insights.
Bird-Eyes is the first of two novels (and an essay collection) by Madelyn Arnold. She also seems to have a new novel in the works, Divided by One. And, she has a column called "Not Thinking Straight" in the Seattle Gay News, to which she has contributed since 1975. Some of her columns (complete with smiling photo) are online, including this one from last year, about suicide: http://www.sgn.org/sgnnews12/page44.cfm.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
Sex Wars: A novel of the turbulent post - Civil War period
by Marge Piercy (NY: HarperCollins, 2005)
This book is 411 pages long, but I wished it were longer.
Marge Piercy is perhaps best known for her 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time, which provided two alternate futures. She is an extremely prolific writer, with at least 15 published novels, plus poetry, essays, and a memoir called Sleeping with Cats. I see from a biography of her online that she was born in Detroit in 1936, and so on March 31 just past, she turned 70.
I've read several of her works and always admired her eye for the political and the feminist. She tended to long works, and some of them felt a bit hastily drawn, though satisfying nonetheless. But in this new book, she has really outdone herself, with the deft and practiced hand of a Julia Child of fiction, she has made the dialogue, the descriptions, the background information, the political and personal analysis all taste just right.
Sex Wars features a number of important historical characters. There is Susan B. Anthony, as seen through the eyes of her long-time feminist colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Through them we learn a great deal about splits and alliances in the women's rights movement and the former abolitionist movement. Perhaps the most dominant character is Victoria Woodhull, best known for running for President when women still didn't have the vote, and for advocating free love. The story of her rise from a family of rascals through spiritualism and wise investment, to become a stockbroker, publisher, and politico -- and then her fall -- is one I knew little about and found really fascinating. Another character, probably invented but emblematic of her class, is Freydeh, a widowed Jewish immigrant from the Pale, who goes into the business of making condoms at home to support herself and children she takes in, and to bring her family to America. Both Woodhull's and Freydeh's stories take the reader in and out of a variety of brothels, assignation houses, and an abortionist's home, and reveal sexual facts of the period. (In terms of birth control, Woodhull prefers the vinegar-soaked sea sponge.) And finally, we have the villain of the piece, though he is rather humanly portrayed, Joseph Comstock. It was Comstock, supported in large part by the YMCA, who gained vast political and personal power over others in the name of anti-vice -- closing bookstores, arresting sellers and makers of contraceptive devices, getting laws passed against both birth control and abortion. I'll certainly never feel the YMCA is an innocuous place to go swimming again! The descriptions of the prisons where the arrested and convicted were housed is fascinating and chilling. Through Woodhull, we also learn a great deal about the great investors of the day: Cornelius Vanderbilt, James Fisk, and Jay Gould; and about a few journalists including the detestable Horace Greeley. There is also a glimpse of ward politics.
I thank Marge Piercy for making this period of history so accessible, absorbing, and modern-feeling. I laugued out loud when I read that Rutherford B. Hayes stole the Presidential election through vote chicanery in Fl0rida, with the connivance of a Republican-packed Supreme Court. The war on contraception is also making a comeback (see the article "The War on Sex" by Cristina Page and tom Paine in Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/rights/36371 ).
I think I'll go back soon and read more of Piercy's works that I've missed, and definitely keep my eye out for her next one.
This book is 411 pages long, but I wished it were longer.
Marge Piercy is perhaps best known for her 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time, which provided two alternate futures. She is an extremely prolific writer, with at least 15 published novels, plus poetry, essays, and a memoir called Sleeping with Cats. I see from a biography of her online that she was born in Detroit in 1936, and so on March 31 just past, she turned 70.
I've read several of her works and always admired her eye for the political and the feminist. She tended to long works, and some of them felt a bit hastily drawn, though satisfying nonetheless. But in this new book, she has really outdone herself, with the deft and practiced hand of a Julia Child of fiction, she has made the dialogue, the descriptions, the background information, the political and personal analysis all taste just right.
Sex Wars features a number of important historical characters. There is Susan B. Anthony, as seen through the eyes of her long-time feminist colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Through them we learn a great deal about splits and alliances in the women's rights movement and the former abolitionist movement. Perhaps the most dominant character is Victoria Woodhull, best known for running for President when women still didn't have the vote, and for advocating free love. The story of her rise from a family of rascals through spiritualism and wise investment, to become a stockbroker, publisher, and politico -- and then her fall -- is one I knew little about and found really fascinating. Another character, probably invented but emblematic of her class, is Freydeh, a widowed Jewish immigrant from the Pale, who goes into the business of making condoms at home to support herself and children she takes in, and to bring her family to America. Both Woodhull's and Freydeh's stories take the reader in and out of a variety of brothels, assignation houses, and an abortionist's home, and reveal sexual facts of the period. (In terms of birth control, Woodhull prefers the vinegar-soaked sea sponge.) And finally, we have the villain of the piece, though he is rather humanly portrayed, Joseph Comstock. It was Comstock, supported in large part by the YMCA, who gained vast political and personal power over others in the name of anti-vice -- closing bookstores, arresting sellers and makers of contraceptive devices, getting laws passed against both birth control and abortion. I'll certainly never feel the YMCA is an innocuous place to go swimming again! The descriptions of the prisons where the arrested and convicted were housed is fascinating and chilling. Through Woodhull, we also learn a great deal about the great investors of the day: Cornelius Vanderbilt, James Fisk, and Jay Gould; and about a few journalists including the detestable Horace Greeley. There is also a glimpse of ward politics.
I thank Marge Piercy for making this period of history so accessible, absorbing, and modern-feeling. I laugued out loud when I read that Rutherford B. Hayes stole the Presidential election through vote chicanery in Fl0rida, with the connivance of a Republican-packed Supreme Court. The war on contraception is also making a comeback (see the article "The War on Sex" by Cristina Page and tom Paine in Alternet: http://www.alternet.org/rights/36371 ).
I think I'll go back soon and read more of Piercy's works that I've missed, and definitely keep my eye out for her next one.
Friday, May 05, 2006
Whispering in Shadows
by Jeannette Armstrong (Penticton, BC, Canada: Theytus Books, 2004)
Jeannette Armstrong is an artist, language teacher, and activist, from the Nsilx tribe of the Okanagan valley of British Columbia. I've had the pleasure of hearing her speak at the International Conference on the Gift Economy, in Las Vegas in 2004 (a speech that can be heard in full on the FIRE website: www.radiofeminista.net/nov04/notas/gifteconomy2.htm or in edited version on WINGS' web archive www.cas.usf.edu/womens_studies/wings.html ). But before that, I ran across her first novel, Slash, at my Vancouver library branch. It wasn't the sort of book I usually read -- male hero -- but for some reason it went home with me and I liked it very much. It was about a young native man from Canada who is looking for himself and first gets involved in drugs, then in politics, and finally reaches some level of comfort.
This second novel of Armstrong's (she has a number of other books) features a woman character, Penny, who grows up on a reservation with some traditional experience and a love of colour and painting, then becomes a teenage mom and soon a single mom of three, then attends college and then university, then becomes a successful artist, then gets politicized as an environmentalist, then becomes an internationalist visiting other indigenous peoples and relating their situation to her own, becomes ill from taking on so much of the pain of the world, and finally returns to help preserve and renew the traditions and solidarity of her own tribe.
The work moves quickly from one stage of Penny's life to the next, but I didn't have a sense that anything was rushed through. Because of the theme of the artist's affinity for colour and light, images are memorable throughout. There are a number of spiritual experiences described -- communication with a tree, for example -- but these are grounded in reality, not metaphysically mystical. One salient feature of the main character is her essential independence in sexual relationships, sharing sex and sometimes her artistic and political experiences with men, but not giving away her power of decision-making. In the end, she realizes that the essential relationship for her is really the tribe, rather than the heterosexual dyad. I think this is a deep insight, that western culture generally slides over: the desire to be in community and in relationship to land and the rest of nature, and to contribute to the common experience and the common good. In the above-mentioned speech at the Gift Economy conference, Armstrong speaks about indigenousness as a balanced and mutually perceptive relationship with all of nature. In this book, she ends with a hopeful sense that it is not too late for peoples of the land to preserve and reinvigorate this tradition.
Outside of BC, it will be hard to find this book, probably. The publisher, Theytus Books, is Aboriginal owned and operated. You can find their website at www.theytusbooks.ca .
For some reason, Jeannette Armstrong's name doesn't show up in their online authors list, but enter Armstrong in the Author search and you'll see five books of hers, including two children's books, and a book on The Native Creative Process.
Jeannette Armstrong is an artist, language teacher, and activist, from the Nsilx tribe of the Okanagan valley of British Columbia. I've had the pleasure of hearing her speak at the International Conference on the Gift Economy, in Las Vegas in 2004 (a speech that can be heard in full on the FIRE website: www.radiofeminista.net/nov04/notas/gifteconomy2.htm or in edited version on WINGS' web archive www.cas.usf.edu/womens_studies/wings.html ). But before that, I ran across her first novel, Slash, at my Vancouver library branch. It wasn't the sort of book I usually read -- male hero -- but for some reason it went home with me and I liked it very much. It was about a young native man from Canada who is looking for himself and first gets involved in drugs, then in politics, and finally reaches some level of comfort.
This second novel of Armstrong's (she has a number of other books) features a woman character, Penny, who grows up on a reservation with some traditional experience and a love of colour and painting, then becomes a teenage mom and soon a single mom of three, then attends college and then university, then becomes a successful artist, then gets politicized as an environmentalist, then becomes an internationalist visiting other indigenous peoples and relating their situation to her own, becomes ill from taking on so much of the pain of the world, and finally returns to help preserve and renew the traditions and solidarity of her own tribe.
The work moves quickly from one stage of Penny's life to the next, but I didn't have a sense that anything was rushed through. Because of the theme of the artist's affinity for colour and light, images are memorable throughout. There are a number of spiritual experiences described -- communication with a tree, for example -- but these are grounded in reality, not metaphysically mystical. One salient feature of the main character is her essential independence in sexual relationships, sharing sex and sometimes her artistic and political experiences with men, but not giving away her power of decision-making. In the end, she realizes that the essential relationship for her is really the tribe, rather than the heterosexual dyad. I think this is a deep insight, that western culture generally slides over: the desire to be in community and in relationship to land and the rest of nature, and to contribute to the common experience and the common good. In the above-mentioned speech at the Gift Economy conference, Armstrong speaks about indigenousness as a balanced and mutually perceptive relationship with all of nature. In this book, she ends with a hopeful sense that it is not too late for peoples of the land to preserve and reinvigorate this tradition.
Outside of BC, it will be hard to find this book, probably. The publisher, Theytus Books, is Aboriginal owned and operated. You can find their website at www.theytusbooks.ca .
For some reason, Jeannette Armstrong's name doesn't show up in their online authors list, but enter Armstrong in the Author search and you'll see five books of hers, including two children's books, and a book on The Native Creative Process.
Friday, April 07, 2006
Women as Lovers
by Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Martin Chalmers (London: Serpent's Tail, 1994; original German language edition Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, 1975)
Not a new book, but newly promoted in paperback because Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. Suzette checked it out of the library and read it before I did. She said it reminded her of Gertrude Stein, and I think that very apt -- especially reminds me of Stein's early fiction, written when she was a medical student practicing on the poor. The resemblance is partly in the short sentences, partly in the way the author maintains detachment and yet depicts the ideation of her subjects in terms of a series of simple calculations. It is perhaps unfair to make too much of Jelinek's style, because it's been my experience that translators put a lot of their own spin on a book's style. I'd like to read more of her after recovering a bit from this one, and sampling one by a different translator might be useful. One of Jelinek's books, The Piano Teacher, seems to be the most famous.
Throughout the reading of this book, I was also much reminded of an anthropological or sociological case study. There is just enough of poetry and humour here and there to keep it from being clinical. But this is essentially a comparative study of two women who make different choices in terms of sexual partnering and then live with the economic effects on their lives. At one point, Jelinek pointedly says that one of these women is a country woman and one is a town woman -- they have different sets of options to work with. One has a job in a brassiere factory. One is plain and very young and sets her sights on becoming a seamstress but soon abandons the training. This woman, who gets the worst of it, is also depicted as rather unfortunately drawn off her economic course early in life by exposure to magazines -- the romanticized ideas of such writing are shown as worse than useless to women. The community and their views figure heavily in the story of the young woman from the country village, and she ultimately suffers a lot from getting caught using that form of capital that women have between their legs. The depiction of the men/husbands in the story is very stark, commodifying them as economic objects whose lovers struggle to wrest them from their parents' possession. A third woman who is middle class and has middle class choices is shown as having more freedom because of her family wealth and her education, but ultimately making a similar choice to have a husband of an appropriate class and have children. Her story is not pursued in depth for long, but she is clearly there to further illuminate class differences. Jelinek characterizes those who have nothing as being primarily concerned to get something -- compared to those who have something being primarily concerned with not losing what they have. When I read that it seemed to explain a lot.
Suzette's summation was that if this book had been longer, the style would have been annoying. Jelinek overtly states that she is not going to waste any time on talking about the scenery, and there is a repetitive feel to the language. But it wasn't longer -- it was only 192 small pages with nice big type and wide margins. Overall, I think Jelinek managed to make something new and fairly gripping out of a story -- two stories, that are nothing new at all, but are very bedrock stories of women in the modern (i.e., industrialized) world.
Not a new book, but newly promoted in paperback because Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. Suzette checked it out of the library and read it before I did. She said it reminded her of Gertrude Stein, and I think that very apt -- especially reminds me of Stein's early fiction, written when she was a medical student practicing on the poor. The resemblance is partly in the short sentences, partly in the way the author maintains detachment and yet depicts the ideation of her subjects in terms of a series of simple calculations. It is perhaps unfair to make too much of Jelinek's style, because it's been my experience that translators put a lot of their own spin on a book's style. I'd like to read more of her after recovering a bit from this one, and sampling one by a different translator might be useful. One of Jelinek's books, The Piano Teacher, seems to be the most famous.
Throughout the reading of this book, I was also much reminded of an anthropological or sociological case study. There is just enough of poetry and humour here and there to keep it from being clinical. But this is essentially a comparative study of two women who make different choices in terms of sexual partnering and then live with the economic effects on their lives. At one point, Jelinek pointedly says that one of these women is a country woman and one is a town woman -- they have different sets of options to work with. One has a job in a brassiere factory. One is plain and very young and sets her sights on becoming a seamstress but soon abandons the training. This woman, who gets the worst of it, is also depicted as rather unfortunately drawn off her economic course early in life by exposure to magazines -- the romanticized ideas of such writing are shown as worse than useless to women. The community and their views figure heavily in the story of the young woman from the country village, and she ultimately suffers a lot from getting caught using that form of capital that women have between their legs. The depiction of the men/husbands in the story is very stark, commodifying them as economic objects whose lovers struggle to wrest them from their parents' possession. A third woman who is middle class and has middle class choices is shown as having more freedom because of her family wealth and her education, but ultimately making a similar choice to have a husband of an appropriate class and have children. Her story is not pursued in depth for long, but she is clearly there to further illuminate class differences. Jelinek characterizes those who have nothing as being primarily concerned to get something -- compared to those who have something being primarily concerned with not losing what they have. When I read that it seemed to explain a lot.
Suzette's summation was that if this book had been longer, the style would have been annoying. Jelinek overtly states that she is not going to waste any time on talking about the scenery, and there is a repetitive feel to the language. But it wasn't longer -- it was only 192 small pages with nice big type and wide margins. Overall, I think Jelinek managed to make something new and fairly gripping out of a story -- two stories, that are nothing new at all, but are very bedrock stories of women in the modern (i.e., industrialized) world.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
Get a Life
by Nadine Gordimer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)
South African Nadine Gordimer received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. It's surprising to me that I've never read anything of hers previously, except perhaps a short story or two. This book has certain qualities of mastery that a really mature and experienced writer can produce. It reminds me of the novels of Doris Lessing post-The Four Gated City. Towards the end of that novel, Lessing shifted her perspective unexpectedly from the personal to the global and began a new era for herself. An interview with Lessing I saw in the Vancouver Sun yesterday (12 March '06) had Lessing saying the books of hers she most wanted people to read were the Shikasta series. Of the Lessing works I've read, I'd say those are the most clearly didactic -- I hope that word is not too unpleasant, as the books are very good -- containing distilled analysis of human tendencies, patterns, and failings, couched in something ostensibly like science fiction tales.
In Get a Life, Gordimer starts off very personally and intimately, and dealing with a subject that is suddenly of interest to me as my friends and I age and decline or get ill. A youngish man who is a father of a young son has thyroid cancer and as the treatment has made him temporarily radioactive, his parents take him into their home and he resumes his relationship, especially with his mother, in a pattern that has parallels with his childhood. Gradually we learn he is an environmentalist and his wife is in advertising and promotion. The tale, which is fairly brief, races through permutations and ironies and big-picture and small-picture observations, including a substantial amount about a majestically self-renewing African river system that is about to be wrecked by dam-building projects. The mother and father's marriage also comes to represent a substantial amount of the plot. Overall, the plot is very unusually shaped and composed. The sentences are also unusual for our time, as they are long and contain unusual combinations of clauses. Occasionally I had to read one over a few times to figure out what it was really saying, what was the relationship of these clauses, but I never felt that the writer had made an error and did not convey what she must have meant. The language gave me a sense of beauty that more often comes from reading good poetry.
The high point of the story seems to me almost a throwaway, in which the author successfully manages to care intensely about the fate of the river and the hero's role in the movement trying to save it, yet be able to simultaneously hold a faith in the ability of nature to make itself work in some way despite all obstacles, and also the view that all of reality is fleeting and perhaps meaningless. The river seems paralleled by several other elements including the marriage of the parents, which decomposes in a complex and more or less organic way.
Finally, this book reminds me of a story told by the very great critic and fairly mediocre poet Richard Howard, in a course he taught at The University of Texas in the 1970s. The painter James Whistler, Howard told us, sued the critic John Ruskin in 1878 for libel, over an insulting review about Whistler's painting of a rocket falling at night. As I recall Howard's telling of the tale, in court the defendant's attorney asked: "Mr. Whistler, how long did it take you to paint this?" "Ten minutes," and as the lawyer began to smirk, "and a lifetime of experience."
South African Nadine Gordimer received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. It's surprising to me that I've never read anything of hers previously, except perhaps a short story or two. This book has certain qualities of mastery that a really mature and experienced writer can produce. It reminds me of the novels of Doris Lessing post-The Four Gated City. Towards the end of that novel, Lessing shifted her perspective unexpectedly from the personal to the global and began a new era for herself. An interview with Lessing I saw in the Vancouver Sun yesterday (12 March '06) had Lessing saying the books of hers she most wanted people to read were the Shikasta series. Of the Lessing works I've read, I'd say those are the most clearly didactic -- I hope that word is not too unpleasant, as the books are very good -- containing distilled analysis of human tendencies, patterns, and failings, couched in something ostensibly like science fiction tales.
In Get a Life, Gordimer starts off very personally and intimately, and dealing with a subject that is suddenly of interest to me as my friends and I age and decline or get ill. A youngish man who is a father of a young son has thyroid cancer and as the treatment has made him temporarily radioactive, his parents take him into their home and he resumes his relationship, especially with his mother, in a pattern that has parallels with his childhood. Gradually we learn he is an environmentalist and his wife is in advertising and promotion. The tale, which is fairly brief, races through permutations and ironies and big-picture and small-picture observations, including a substantial amount about a majestically self-renewing African river system that is about to be wrecked by dam-building projects. The mother and father's marriage also comes to represent a substantial amount of the plot. Overall, the plot is very unusually shaped and composed. The sentences are also unusual for our time, as they are long and contain unusual combinations of clauses. Occasionally I had to read one over a few times to figure out what it was really saying, what was the relationship of these clauses, but I never felt that the writer had made an error and did not convey what she must have meant. The language gave me a sense of beauty that more often comes from reading good poetry.
The high point of the story seems to me almost a throwaway, in which the author successfully manages to care intensely about the fate of the river and the hero's role in the movement trying to save it, yet be able to simultaneously hold a faith in the ability of nature to make itself work in some way despite all obstacles, and also the view that all of reality is fleeting and perhaps meaningless. The river seems paralleled by several other elements including the marriage of the parents, which decomposes in a complex and more or less organic way.
Finally, this book reminds me of a story told by the very great critic and fairly mediocre poet Richard Howard, in a course he taught at The University of Texas in the 1970s. The painter James Whistler, Howard told us, sued the critic John Ruskin in 1878 for libel, over an insulting review about Whistler's painting of a rocket falling at night. As I recall Howard's telling of the tale, in court the defendant's attorney asked: "Mr. Whistler, how long did it take you to paint this?" "Ten minutes," and as the lawyer began to smirk, "and a lifetime of experience."
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Women's Review of Books
Just a note to let readers know that the Women's Review of Books is back in publication after more than a year on hiatus. Published since 1983, and based out of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, it's a great source of information about books and their contents. In the last issue before hiatus, there was a much-appreciated article about the 2004 Nobel Prize winner for literature, Elfriede Jelinek from Austria. The article can be found online at www.wellesley.edu/womensreview/archive/2004/12/highlt.html#milkman .
Subscription information for the renascent WRB is at www.wcwonline.org/womensreview/
Subscription information for the renascent WRB is at www.wcwonline.org/womensreview/
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Swiss Sonata
by Gwethalyn Graham (Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2005)
The Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Program provided support for the re-publication of this work. It was first published in 1938, and won the Governor General's Award in that year, for its 25-year-old author. The revival of the book is due in large measure to Elspeth Cameron, who wrote its Introduction. Cameron is a well-known biographer of some male Canadian writers, and chronicles her growing interest in female writers in a memoir called No Previous Experience.
While I'm very grateful to Cameron for bringing this book back to readers, and for giving us some biographical and historical background, I have some disagreements with her assessment of the book, which I find unjustly critical. Cameron describes some of the discussions between the international residents of the Swiss girls' school as "forced," and "vehicles for [Graham's] strongly held views." She also finds the portrayal of the main character, Vicky Morrison, to be the book's "greatest flaw" -- the character "too good to be true." Maybe I should thank Cameron, actually, for lowering my expectations of the book up front, because perhaps in reaction I found it unusually good.
Swiss Sonata takes place during three days of January 1935, on the eve of the plebiscite in the Saar coal-mining region that returned this valuable resource to Germany ( and would give Germany fuel to make steel for the war). The politics of the moment contribute to stressful dynamics among the students -- students ranging in age from fifteen to 25 and coming from 14 countries. (I was very grateful for a list of dramatis personae that appeared in the front of the book, listing the names of the students and the staff and their countries -- it's rare to find a book with so many characters all having a share of the action.)
The staff of the school are a bit out of their depth both in controlling and helping their young charges, as is pretty typical of educational institutions. They also (and one teacher in particular) develop some animosity towards the 21-year-old Canadian Vicky Morrison, whose way of interacting with the others carries an authority of its own that shows them up. It has come to their attention that she is exercising what I like to call "leadership from below," as opposed to deferring to authority for leadership.
As the book begins, Vicky is a mystery figure to the reader, and the most visible characters are a sympathetic young sports teacher named Mary Ellerton, from London, and a friend of Vicky's named Theodora Cohen, a Jewish girl from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Ted is outspoken and raffish, and gives a lot of life to the tale.
One of the advantages of this book having been written in 1938 instead of today is that none of the characters is required to come out as a lesbian. Nor are there any heterosexual sex scenes. Instead, this is that rare thing, a very homosocial book. There are sympathetic friendships and also obsessive fixations on others, but the simplistic and dyadic (and one might even say the "exchange-oriented"*) motivation of sexual attraction is eschewed in favour of other focuses. There is a lot of dynamic around being accepted or rejected, and being accepting or rejecting, and also around conflicting loyalties. Life decisions on the table for the characters include choices between being married and having an education and a career in some cases, and in others between introversion and caring.
The portrayal of caring, including gratuitous (i.e., gift*) caring, was much more common in earlier eras' fiction it seems to me than it is in today's. Modern hedonism has probably shaped us much more than we realise. Swiss Sonata reminds me of Louisa May Alcott's book Little Men, which I enjoyed in my childhood -- also about a school and the work of molding youth into strong, caring and and self-realized adults. I'm also put in mind of the Canadian girls' classic Anne of Green Gables, in which a young girl also teaches life lessons to her elders. But Graham's book is an adult work, and about characters in the age range of from mid-teens to mid-fifties; the compromises, the paradoxes, and the failings of caring are much more in evidence.
To return to the character of Vicky Morrison and the question of whether she is believable or not: On one level, she turns out to be a bit of a Miranda, having been given a classical education in an isolated setting. I found that bit of her history somewhat unbelievable (my opinion is that home-schooling is more likely to make one narrow). However, the observation that she and a few of the other characters are intellectuals who apply their knowledge to understanding people, while other characters do not, I found realistic. Perhaps the fact that her leadership-from-below is noticed by the authorities and excites their jealousy is far-fetched -- it seems to me that this kind of leadership is very rarely observed by the authorities (but then, I've never gone to a girls' school). Her "saintly" nature may be carried a bit too far, but I liked the way she herself characterizes it -- that her persona takes on a meaning for others that hasn't too much relationship to how she feels inside. I think she is fairly portrayed as trying to feel her way with others and not always understanding or being able to help them. She herself says of her failed attempts that it's as if you were asking a medical student just graduated to perform brain surgery. In the end some of the authorities come to admire her people sense.
The line I liked best was one character's description that Vicky "has the gift of self-dismissal." This is a very real gift that some of us only learn to practice later in life. (There is in fact a school of study called "non-defensive communication" [ see www.pndc.com] that tries to help people acquire this way of interacting.) Apropos of the period in which Vicky was living, with national and political partisanship coming strongly to the fore, I'm also thinking of the ideas of Sisela Bok, contrasting the partisan and non-partisan ways of thinking. The partisan can think of only his own views and can't set them aside for the purpose of feeling, imagining or understanding the other's situation. Bok sees times of war bringing people more strongly into partisan relationship.
Today (Jan. 12, 2006), I was listening to CBC radio and heard an interview with a Canadian who has just written a book about values in the United States and Canada. He said he found more than half of those polled in the US were hedonists who didn't believe in empathizing with others. The proportion of people with those values in Canada is much lower.
Vicky Morrison is a character who has a very marked ability to set her own priorities aside and just listen to others, and then to think about the happiness and growth of the people she has heard. As Elspeth Cameron explains it, the characters in Swiss Sonata represent their own respective countries. I infer from this something about the persistence of Canadian values between 1938 and today, and I hope that they can survive the onslaught of American media and guns coming across the border and continue to set an example for the world.
-----
*For more about gift-giving and exchange, see Genevieve Vaughan's book For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange ( information and text online at www.for-giving.com )
The Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Program provided support for the re-publication of this work. It was first published in 1938, and won the Governor General's Award in that year, for its 25-year-old author. The revival of the book is due in large measure to Elspeth Cameron, who wrote its Introduction. Cameron is a well-known biographer of some male Canadian writers, and chronicles her growing interest in female writers in a memoir called No Previous Experience.
While I'm very grateful to Cameron for bringing this book back to readers, and for giving us some biographical and historical background, I have some disagreements with her assessment of the book, which I find unjustly critical. Cameron describes some of the discussions between the international residents of the Swiss girls' school as "forced," and "vehicles for [Graham's] strongly held views." She also finds the portrayal of the main character, Vicky Morrison, to be the book's "greatest flaw" -- the character "too good to be true." Maybe I should thank Cameron, actually, for lowering my expectations of the book up front, because perhaps in reaction I found it unusually good.
Swiss Sonata takes place during three days of January 1935, on the eve of the plebiscite in the Saar coal-mining region that returned this valuable resource to Germany ( and would give Germany fuel to make steel for the war). The politics of the moment contribute to stressful dynamics among the students -- students ranging in age from fifteen to 25 and coming from 14 countries. (I was very grateful for a list of dramatis personae that appeared in the front of the book, listing the names of the students and the staff and their countries -- it's rare to find a book with so many characters all having a share of the action.)
The staff of the school are a bit out of their depth both in controlling and helping their young charges, as is pretty typical of educational institutions. They also (and one teacher in particular) develop some animosity towards the 21-year-old Canadian Vicky Morrison, whose way of interacting with the others carries an authority of its own that shows them up. It has come to their attention that she is exercising what I like to call "leadership from below," as opposed to deferring to authority for leadership.
As the book begins, Vicky is a mystery figure to the reader, and the most visible characters are a sympathetic young sports teacher named Mary Ellerton, from London, and a friend of Vicky's named Theodora Cohen, a Jewish girl from St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Ted is outspoken and raffish, and gives a lot of life to the tale.
One of the advantages of this book having been written in 1938 instead of today is that none of the characters is required to come out as a lesbian. Nor are there any heterosexual sex scenes. Instead, this is that rare thing, a very homosocial book. There are sympathetic friendships and also obsessive fixations on others, but the simplistic and dyadic (and one might even say the "exchange-oriented"*) motivation of sexual attraction is eschewed in favour of other focuses. There is a lot of dynamic around being accepted or rejected, and being accepting or rejecting, and also around conflicting loyalties. Life decisions on the table for the characters include choices between being married and having an education and a career in some cases, and in others between introversion and caring.
The portrayal of caring, including gratuitous (i.e., gift*) caring, was much more common in earlier eras' fiction it seems to me than it is in today's. Modern hedonism has probably shaped us much more than we realise. Swiss Sonata reminds me of Louisa May Alcott's book Little Men, which I enjoyed in my childhood -- also about a school and the work of molding youth into strong, caring and and self-realized adults. I'm also put in mind of the Canadian girls' classic Anne of Green Gables, in which a young girl also teaches life lessons to her elders. But Graham's book is an adult work, and about characters in the age range of from mid-teens to mid-fifties; the compromises, the paradoxes, and the failings of caring are much more in evidence.
To return to the character of Vicky Morrison and the question of whether she is believable or not: On one level, she turns out to be a bit of a Miranda, having been given a classical education in an isolated setting. I found that bit of her history somewhat unbelievable (my opinion is that home-schooling is more likely to make one narrow). However, the observation that she and a few of the other characters are intellectuals who apply their knowledge to understanding people, while other characters do not, I found realistic. Perhaps the fact that her leadership-from-below is noticed by the authorities and excites their jealousy is far-fetched -- it seems to me that this kind of leadership is very rarely observed by the authorities (but then, I've never gone to a girls' school). Her "saintly" nature may be carried a bit too far, but I liked the way she herself characterizes it -- that her persona takes on a meaning for others that hasn't too much relationship to how she feels inside. I think she is fairly portrayed as trying to feel her way with others and not always understanding or being able to help them. She herself says of her failed attempts that it's as if you were asking a medical student just graduated to perform brain surgery. In the end some of the authorities come to admire her people sense.
The line I liked best was one character's description that Vicky "has the gift of self-dismissal." This is a very real gift that some of us only learn to practice later in life. (There is in fact a school of study called "non-defensive communication" [ see www.pndc.com] that tries to help people acquire this way of interacting.) Apropos of the period in which Vicky was living, with national and political partisanship coming strongly to the fore, I'm also thinking of the ideas of Sisela Bok, contrasting the partisan and non-partisan ways of thinking. The partisan can think of only his own views and can't set them aside for the purpose of feeling, imagining or understanding the other's situation. Bok sees times of war bringing people more strongly into partisan relationship.
Today (Jan. 12, 2006), I was listening to CBC radio and heard an interview with a Canadian who has just written a book about values in the United States and Canada. He said he found more than half of those polled in the US were hedonists who didn't believe in empathizing with others. The proportion of people with those values in Canada is much lower.
Vicky Morrison is a character who has a very marked ability to set her own priorities aside and just listen to others, and then to think about the happiness and growth of the people she has heard. As Elspeth Cameron explains it, the characters in Swiss Sonata represent their own respective countries. I infer from this something about the persistence of Canadian values between 1938 and today, and I hope that they can survive the onslaught of American media and guns coming across the border and continue to set an example for the world.
-----
*For more about gift-giving and exchange, see Genevieve Vaughan's book For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange ( information and text online at www.for-giving.com )
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Green River, Running Red: the real story of the Green River Killer - America's deadliest serial murderer
by Ann Rule (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004)
I chose this book out of what was on offer in paperback in a small airport bookstore. Aside from the fact that there was little else in my price range, I chose it for two reasons. One was that I had recently read Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders [see my review in this blog] and I wanted to continue my education on femicide and compare the two books. The other reason was that I had heard about feminist protests around the Green River murders in the 1980s, but had not seen any details about the killer being caught. Rule only published this book in 2004, after his conviction, though she had been keeping notes for many years.
Rule is a writer who specializes in true crime stories. Unlike Truman Capote, she is not very literary. Her style is clear, but tends to be repetitive, and this book could have been edited somewhat for brevity. It weighs in at 661 pages, not including the acknowledgments. The only book this long I can remember reading all the way through was The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, which had the redeeming feature of being very funny. I'm not sure if I will ever finish this one, so I am writing it up though I'm only on page 383.
If I do finish reading it, it will be for the same reason she says she finished writing it at such a length -- i.e., because of her commitment to giving a human face and a personal story to most if not all of the women who were murdered by Gary Ridgway. There are 47 women's faces pictured at the front of the book. All of them are named during the course of it, and their situations described; and in many cases their friends' and families' reminiscences are included. Many of them were teenagers, and many but not all of them made money from street prostitution, a class of persons that Gary Ridgway both patronized and despised. Quite a few of the women had children. Some came from unhappy homes, others not. Many lived with their boyfriend/pimps; others with mothers, real boyfriends, husbands, or friends. Some were young and rebellious; some financially desperate; some were hitchhiking; some were only in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many were white and many black. Some were pregnant. There's a feeling of the cautionary tale hovering about this story, but because Rule is scrupulous about including masses of detail, the cautionary aspect is not played up. True, you could get killed for being a teenager sexually out of control; or, you could be killed because you walked down the street to visit a relative.
As a crime writer, Rule works closely with the police, and she devotes a good part of the book to their work. During the course of the so-called Green River Killer's sequence of murders, Rule writes, the term "serial killer" was coined, the use of computers for police work was pioneered, the art of profiling suspects was further developed, and forensic science went through major changes. The amount of money and the numbers of people working full time on solving this long series of murders also grew vastly. There were several changes of command. According to Rule, the police withheld most of what they were doing from press and public in order to build a prosecutable case when the killer was found. They also had to wade through tens of thousands of leads and many false confessions, and eliminate many likely suspects. They did have police watching the area where women picking up johns were most frequently abducted, and they also had police decoys. Eventually, through reading this, I'm sure I'll find out what it was that worked for the police, how they caught the killer.
In taking the part of the police, Rule gives short shrift to the feminists, stopping just short of demonizing them for causing the police additional grief. If you want to find that section, turn in the paperback to page 281 ff, where Rule talks briefly about the Women's Coalition to Stop the Green River Murders and the U.S. Prostitutes Collective having a parade in March of 1984. I'll quote from page 282:
". . .Women's Libbers were often strident because they felt there was no other way. 'The issue is the killing of women,' [Melissa] Adams said. 'But we are showing unity with prostitutes who are the victims of this killer --and victims of a sexist society.
"'Violence against women is an all-American sport.'
"Perhaps it was. . . . But the coalition had chosen the wrong target, and it wasn't the Green River Task Force, whose members yearned to catch the man. . ."
Rule breaks up the story by jump-cutting back and forth among descriptions of the women and their lives at the time they disappeared; their families; a few people who interjected themselves into the case as psychics and police wannabes; the finding of bodies (mostly in clusters); the identification of the mostly skeletonized dead; stories by people who knew and interacted with the killer; and, the most imaginative part, a description of the life and state of mind of the killer himself, apparently boiled down from interviews with Ridgway. Her portrait of the murderer shows a not very smart child who was dissed by his family and found power in killing animals, went through a phase of religious fundamentalism, suffered some losses in divorce, and discovered prostitutes as both a source of pleasure and easy marks, whom he could rationalize killing. He was both a sex addict and a murder addict.
Most shocking from a female point of view is that Ridgway seems to have managed to appear like a reasonably nice guy and even a gentle lover or a normal husband to some women, while abducting and killing others. And he was good enough at dissembling that even though he'd been questioned by police, other people seemed more likely suspects.
The crux of this book seems to be that it's unlikely one can tell by looking whom to be afraid of, and it's unwise to trust your guts about whom to trust. I'm reminded of the credo of Vancouver Rape Relief: "Every man is a potential rapist." But shouldn't there be better ways to tell which ones are?
I chose this book out of what was on offer in paperback in a small airport bookstore. Aside from the fact that there was little else in my price range, I chose it for two reasons. One was that I had recently read Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders [see my review in this blog] and I wanted to continue my education on femicide and compare the two books. The other reason was that I had heard about feminist protests around the Green River murders in the 1980s, but had not seen any details about the killer being caught. Rule only published this book in 2004, after his conviction, though she had been keeping notes for many years.
Rule is a writer who specializes in true crime stories. Unlike Truman Capote, she is not very literary. Her style is clear, but tends to be repetitive, and this book could have been edited somewhat for brevity. It weighs in at 661 pages, not including the acknowledgments. The only book this long I can remember reading all the way through was The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth, which had the redeeming feature of being very funny. I'm not sure if I will ever finish this one, so I am writing it up though I'm only on page 383.
If I do finish reading it, it will be for the same reason she says she finished writing it at such a length -- i.e., because of her commitment to giving a human face and a personal story to most if not all of the women who were murdered by Gary Ridgway. There are 47 women's faces pictured at the front of the book. All of them are named during the course of it, and their situations described; and in many cases their friends' and families' reminiscences are included. Many of them were teenagers, and many but not all of them made money from street prostitution, a class of persons that Gary Ridgway both patronized and despised. Quite a few of the women had children. Some came from unhappy homes, others not. Many lived with their boyfriend/pimps; others with mothers, real boyfriends, husbands, or friends. Some were young and rebellious; some financially desperate; some were hitchhiking; some were only in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many were white and many black. Some were pregnant. There's a feeling of the cautionary tale hovering about this story, but because Rule is scrupulous about including masses of detail, the cautionary aspect is not played up. True, you could get killed for being a teenager sexually out of control; or, you could be killed because you walked down the street to visit a relative.
As a crime writer, Rule works closely with the police, and she devotes a good part of the book to their work. During the course of the so-called Green River Killer's sequence of murders, Rule writes, the term "serial killer" was coined, the use of computers for police work was pioneered, the art of profiling suspects was further developed, and forensic science went through major changes. The amount of money and the numbers of people working full time on solving this long series of murders also grew vastly. There were several changes of command. According to Rule, the police withheld most of what they were doing from press and public in order to build a prosecutable case when the killer was found. They also had to wade through tens of thousands of leads and many false confessions, and eliminate many likely suspects. They did have police watching the area where women picking up johns were most frequently abducted, and they also had police decoys. Eventually, through reading this, I'm sure I'll find out what it was that worked for the police, how they caught the killer.
In taking the part of the police, Rule gives short shrift to the feminists, stopping just short of demonizing them for causing the police additional grief. If you want to find that section, turn in the paperback to page 281 ff, where Rule talks briefly about the Women's Coalition to Stop the Green River Murders and the U.S. Prostitutes Collective having a parade in March of 1984. I'll quote from page 282:
". . .Women's Libbers were often strident because they felt there was no other way. 'The issue is the killing of women,' [Melissa] Adams said. 'But we are showing unity with prostitutes who are the victims of this killer --and victims of a sexist society.
"'Violence against women is an all-American sport.'
"Perhaps it was. . . . But the coalition had chosen the wrong target, and it wasn't the Green River Task Force, whose members yearned to catch the man. . ."
Rule breaks up the story by jump-cutting back and forth among descriptions of the women and their lives at the time they disappeared; their families; a few people who interjected themselves into the case as psychics and police wannabes; the finding of bodies (mostly in clusters); the identification of the mostly skeletonized dead; stories by people who knew and interacted with the killer; and, the most imaginative part, a description of the life and state of mind of the killer himself, apparently boiled down from interviews with Ridgway. Her portrait of the murderer shows a not very smart child who was dissed by his family and found power in killing animals, went through a phase of religious fundamentalism, suffered some losses in divorce, and discovered prostitutes as both a source of pleasure and easy marks, whom he could rationalize killing. He was both a sex addict and a murder addict.
Most shocking from a female point of view is that Ridgway seems to have managed to appear like a reasonably nice guy and even a gentle lover or a normal husband to some women, while abducting and killing others. And he was good enough at dissembling that even though he'd been questioned by police, other people seemed more likely suspects.
The crux of this book seems to be that it's unlikely one can tell by looking whom to be afraid of, and it's unwise to trust your guts about whom to trust. I'm reminded of the credo of Vancouver Rape Relief: "Every man is a potential rapist." But shouldn't there be better ways to tell which ones are?
Sunday, October 23, 2005
autobiography of a blue-eyed devil: my life and times in a racist, imperialist society
by inga muscio (Emeryville CA: Seal Press, 2005)
Usually when I read books of personal essays, I don't start at the beginning and work straight through to the end, I skip around in them and dig out things I like. I did that with Inga Muscio's previous book, Cunt; but this book pulled me straight through very fast from beginning to end. It's well-written, fresh, full of different tales and varied approaches to telling the stories; yet there's a logic that builds from chapter to chapter and becomes very convincing. The theme is that a young woman from a not-terribly-privileged white background who is open to others and desires social change learns from both her experiences and her research, not only that there is racism in her society and that it is much deeper and more serious than she imagined, but also how it has put its tentacles into her own mind and behaviour. To me, this is a book about working to overthrow colonization of racist ideas in a person's own brain. Yet it's never too heavy, always giving you that breath of poetry or narration or whatever it takes to keep you hanging in. Very interesting and valuable and refreshing book.
Usually when I read books of personal essays, I don't start at the beginning and work straight through to the end, I skip around in them and dig out things I like. I did that with Inga Muscio's previous book, Cunt; but this book pulled me straight through very fast from beginning to end. It's well-written, fresh, full of different tales and varied approaches to telling the stories; yet there's a logic that builds from chapter to chapter and becomes very convincing. The theme is that a young woman from a not-terribly-privileged white background who is open to others and desires social change learns from both her experiences and her research, not only that there is racism in her society and that it is much deeper and more serious than she imagined, but also how it has put its tentacles into her own mind and behaviour. To me, this is a book about working to overthrow colonization of racist ideas in a person's own brain. Yet it's never too heavy, always giving you that breath of poetry or narration or whatever it takes to keep you hanging in. Very interesting and valuable and refreshing book.
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