[Men who know who I am and who read my blog are not going to be the type of man described in the first part of this posting. This first part is for the ladies. However, for the gentlemen, please scroll down to find the two other articles quoted. ]
“He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his grainy wood table and said to me, “So? I hear you’ve written a couple of books.”
“I replied, “Several, actually.”
“He said, in the way you encourage your friend’s 7-year-old to describe flute practice, “And what are they about?”
“They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, my book on Eadweard Muybridge, the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.
“He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. “And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?”
“So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingenue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I’d somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book — with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.
“Here, let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled with lovely men, including a long succession of editors who have, since I was young, listened and encouraged and published me; with my infinitely generous younger brother; with splendid male friends. Still, there are these other men too.
“So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, “That’s her book.” Or tried to interrupt him anyway.
“But he just continued on his way. She had to say, “That’s her book” three or four times before he finally took it in. And then, as if in a 19th century novel, he went ashen. That I was indeed the author of the very important book it turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the New York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he was stunned speechless — for a moment, before he began holding forth again. Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing. …”
“… A few years after the idiot in Aspen, I was in Berlin giving a talk when a writer friend invited me to a dinner that included a male translator and three women a little younger than me who would remain deferential and mostly silent throughout the meal. Perhaps the translator was peeved that I insisted on playing a modest role in the conversation, but when I said something about how Women Strike for Peace, the extraordinary, little-known antinuclear and antiwar group founded in 1961, helped bring down the communist-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities, Mr. Very Important II sneered at me. The House committee, he insisted, no longer existed in the early 1960s and, anyway, no women’s group played such a role in its downfall. His scorn was so withering, his confidence so aggressive, that arguing with him seemed a scary exercise in futility and an invitation to more insult.
“I had written a book that drew from primary documents and interviews about Women Strike for Peace. But explaining men still assume that I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge. A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch — even if you can write one of Virginia Woolf’s long mellifluous musical sentences about the subtle subjugation of women in the snow with your willie. Back in my hotel room, I Googled a bit and found that Eric Bentley in his definitive history of the House Committee on Un-American Activities credits Women Strike for Peace with “striking the crucial blow in the fall of HUAC’s Bastille.” In the early 1960s.
“Dude, if you’re reading this, you’re a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame.”
- from an article in the LA Times, Men Who Explain Things by Rebecca Solnit
For a slightly longer version of the same article, go to TomDispatch. (Notice that the end credit on this version of the article says of her, “She lives in San Francisco, of course.”)
Though I love this Solnit article, I don’t think of myself as a feminist. I am opposed to any kind of self-rightousness wherever it may be found (even or especially in myself).
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Ms. Solnit also wrote a very good anti-war/activist article (and subsequently, a book) called Acts of Hope that I highly recommend. Two brief quotes:
“History is like weather, not like checkers. A game of checkers ends. The weather never does.”
“Activism is not a journey to the corner store; it is a plunge into the dark.”
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And another more controversial article is about Sontag, written at the time of her death called Sontag and Tsunami. I’ll give you two quotes, both out of context (they don’t accurately characterize the full article), but which I found especially interesting:
“It is not important whether or not Sontag was always right in her conclusions, only that she was right in raising the issues that she did; for the most useful position is the one that prompts people to test an idea and perhaps think for themselves by disagreeing. After all, on key subjects from communism to photography, she eventually disagreed with her earlier self. What she said when writing about the Jewish mystic Simone Weil can be said of her outspoken writing as well: “An idea which is a distortion may have a greater intellectual thrust than the truth; it may better serve the needs of the spirit…”
“… What is now most striking now about Sontag’s argument is that it is not so much about photography but about compassion, an emotion and an ethic that photographs can awaken or undermine. Elsewhere in Regarding the Pain of Others, she writes, “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. People don’t become inured to what they are shown — if that’s the right way to describe what happens — because of the quantity of images dumped on them. It is passivity that dulls feeling.”
“We can act to deal with the consequences of the earthquake and tsunami, but the disaster was only faintly political — not only the poor died but thousands of Europeans and Americans. The relief will be very political, in who gives how much, and to whom it is given, but the event itself transcends politics, the realm of things we cause and can work to prevent. We cannot wish that human beings were not subject to the forces of nature, including the mortality that is so central a part of our own nature. We cannot wish that the seas dry up, that the waves grow still, that the tectonic plates cease to exist, that nature ceases to be beyond our abilities to predict and control. But the terms of that nature include such catastrophe and such suffering, which leaves us with sorrow as not a problem to be solved but a fact. And it leaves us with compassion as the work we will never finish.”
-Julie
