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 Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 2:00 pm Post subject: |
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From Impossible Odds:
The New York Times Magazine
Magazine Subscription
The End of the End of the Revolution
Castro's Cuba is turning 50. It's been dying for years. What can Obama - or anyone else - do to help bring the island into the 21st century?
By Roger Cohen
Dec. 7/08
| Quote: | ... Looking out on the ocean, I searched in vain for a single boat.
It was not always so, 90 miles off the coast of Florida. In 1859, Richard Henry Dana Jr., an American lawyer whose “To Cuba and Back” became a classic, sailed into Havana. He later wrote: “What a world of shipping! The masts make a belt of dense forest along the edge of the city, all the ships lying head into the street, like horses at their mangers.” Over the ensuing century, Cuba became the winter playground of Americans, a place to gamble, rumba, smoke puros and sip mojitos, the land of every vice and any trade. Havana bars advertised “Hangover Breakfasts.” They were much in demand. The mafia loved the island, the largest in the Caribbean; so did the American businessmen who controlled swathes of the sugar industry and much else.
Then, a half-century ago, on Jan. 1, 1959, Fidel Castro brought down the curtain on Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. America’s cavorting-cum-commerce ceased. Miami became Cuba’s second city as, over the years, hundreds of thousands fled communist rule. ...
... A repressive society long under a single ruler — the ailing 82-year-old Fidel still holds Cubans in his thrall even if he formally handed the presidency to his younger brother, Raúl, in 2006 — develops a secret lexicon of survival.
Through a labyrinth of rations, regulations, two currencies and four markets (peso, hard currency, agro and black), people make their way. Stress is rare but depression rampant in an inertia-stricken economy. Truth is layered. Look up and you see the Habana Libre, the towering hotel where Fidel briefly had his headquarters after the revolution: it began life as the Hilton. The seafront Riviera hotel, now so communist-drab it seems to reek of cabbage, once housed the rakish casino of the mobster Meyer Lansky. ...
One official stop was with Elena Álvarez, who was 15 when Fidel’s revolution came and now, at 65, works as a top official at the Ministry of Economics. She tried to make sense for me of the voodoo economics I’d seen.
Here’s what she wanted me to grasp. Cuba, at the time of the revolution, was “one of the most unjust, unequal and exploited societies on earth.” Illiteracy was running up to 40 percent, a quarter of the best land was in U.S. hands, a corrupt bourgeoisie lorded it over everyone else. Fidel’s initial objective was a more-just society, but U.S. pressure radicalized his revolution and pushed it toward all-out socialism within the Soviet camp.
Álvarez reeled off some numbers. There were 6,000 doctors in Cuba at the time of the revolution; there are now close to 80,000 for a population of 11.3 million, one of the highest per-capita rates in the world. The U.S. embargo has cost Cuba about $200 billion in real terms. When the Berlin Wall crumbled, 80 percent of Cuba’s international trade was with Soviet-bloc countries. About 98 percent of oil came from them. Back to the Communist bloc states, at inflated prices, went Cuba’s sugar and rum.
“We’ve had to reinsert ourselves in the global economy twice in 30 years, once in 1960 and again in 1990,” Álvarez said.
O.K., I said, that shows some resilience, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, why didn’t Cuba do what Moscow’s other satellites did: take down totalitarianism, become a market economy and set people free? The real totalitarianism, she countered, was Batista’s. Cuba now has different values. Despite scarcities, attributable in large part to the embargo, it’s a society that wants to protect everyone. The rationing system guarantees that all citizens have a minimum. Everyone gets low-cost food at work. Free health care and education mean a $20 monthly salary is the wrong way to view the quality of Cuban life. Going to a market economy in 1990 would have meant wholesale factory closures, as in East Germany, and 35 percent unemployment. “We decided we had to protect our workers,” Álvarez said. “We have another philosophy.”
That “philosophy” has produced results. According to the World Health Organization, life expectancy for men and women in Cuba is 76 and 80 years, respectively, on par with the U.S. The comparative figures in Haiti are 59 and 63, and in the Dominican Republic they are 66 and 74. The probability of dying before the age of 5 is 7 per 1,000 live births in Cuba — nearly as good as the U.S. figure — compared with 80 per 1,000 live births in Haiti and 29 in the Dominican Republic. Illiteracy has been eliminated. United Nations statistics show 93.7 percent of Cuban children complete high school, far more than in the United States or elsewhere in the Caribbean. (emphasis added)
That raises the question: Why educate people so well and then deny them access to the Internet, travel and the opportunity to apply their skills? Why give them a great education and no life? Why not at least offer a Chinese or Vietnamese model, with a market economy under one-party rule?
Álvarez said there was some “space for the market.” She insisted, “We are not fundamentalist.” But the bottom line, of course, is that the authorities are scared: opening the door to capitalism on an island 90 miles from Florida is very different from doing that in Asia. (-- pgs. 44-51) |
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| Posted: Fri Jun 05, 2009 12:11 pm Post subject: |
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New Yorker
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Goodbye, Columbus
When America won its independence, what became of the slaves who fled for theirs?
By Jill Lepore
| Quote: | Born on the Gambia River around 1740, not far from where he would one day die, Harry Washinton (see Fleeing the Founding Father by Cassandra Pybus March 16/06) was sold into slavery sometime before 1763. Twelve years later, in November, 1775, he was grooming his master's horses in the stables at Mount Vernon when the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty's troops in suppressing the American rebellion. That December, George Washington, commanding the Continental Army in Cambridge, received a report that Dunmore's proclamation had stirred the passions of his own slaves. "There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believed they could make the escape," a cousin of Washington's from Mount Vernon, adding bitterly, "Liberty is sweet." In August of 1776, just a month after delegates to the Continental Congress determined that in the course of human events it sometimes becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands that have connected them with another, Harry Washington declared his own independence by running away to fight with Dunmore's all-black British regiment, wearing a uniform embroidered with the motto, "Liberty to Slaves." Liberty may not have been as sweet as he'd hoped. For most of the war, he belonged to an unarmed company known as the Black Pioneers, who were more or less garbagemen, ordered to "Assist in Cleaning the Streets & Removing all Nuisances being thrown into the Streets." The Black Pioneers followed British troops under the command of Henry Clinton as they moved from New York to Philadelphia to Charleston, and, after the fall of Charleston, back to New York again, which is how Harry Washington came to be in the city in 1783, and keen to leave before General Washington repossessed it, and him.
No one knows how many former slaves had fled the United States by the end of the American Revolution. Not as many as wanted to, anyway. During the war, between eighty thousand and a hundred thousand (nearly one in five) left their homes, running from slavery to the freedom promised by the British, and betting on a British victory. They lost that bet. They died in battle, they died of disease, they ended up someplace else, they ended up back where they started, and worse off. (A fifteen-year-old girl captured while heading for Dunmore's regiment was greeted by her master with a whipping of eighty lashes, after which he poured hot embers into her wounds.)
... (It was at (George) Washington's insistence that the names of those who boarded British ships were recorded in the "Book of Negroes," so that owners might later file claims for compensation.) In Charleston, after the ships were full, British soldiers patrolled the wharves to keep back the black men, women, and children who were frantic to leave the country. A small number managed to duck under the redcoats' raised bayonets, jump off the wharves and swim out to the last longboats ferrying passengers to the British fleet, whose crowded ships included the aptly named Free Briton. Clinging to the sides of the longboats, they were not allowed on board but neither would they let go; in the end, their fingers were chopped off.
But those who did leave America also left American history. Or, rather, they have been left out of it... (-- pgs. 74-75) |
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| Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 10:59 am Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
Sally Ride
A generation later, the first female astronaut is still on a mission.
By K.C. Cole
November, 2005
Is homosexuality, we wonder, the real reason girls are 'behind the eight ball' in science?
| Quote: | Sally Ride, the nation's first woman astronaut, no longer flies for NASA, but she has embarked on a mission into territory that is just as mysterious and controversial, and is much closer to home: making sure that girls get to share in the adventure that is science.
This is not an easy task in an age when the president of Harvard, no less, hypothesizes that girls can't cut it in science because they lack the inherent ability. In truth, though, Dr. Ride, who earned her doctorate in physics, thinks that Dr. Lawrence Summers' January 2005 statement inadvertently helped more than harmed her cause. ... Even today, Ride says, "you see all these boys who get Cs in math and say, 'I'm going to be an engineer!' And all these girls who get As in math and say, 'I'm not good enough.'" ... And so she's spent the last five years creating the Sally Ride Science Club, science festivals, summer camps, newsletters, career guides, Web site and books - all under the umbrella of her company, Sally Ride Science. ... That purpose is to smooth the bumps, especially for the middle school girls who seem to be the most vulnerable. (-- pgs. 65-66) |
... or is it an ethics problem?
| Quote: | | Francis Crick died in July 2004, age 88. Maurice Wilkins died two months later, age 87. In Stockholm in December 1962, Crick, Wilkins and James Watson had shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery nine years - as all the world knows - of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid DNA, the stuff that genes are made of. Another scientist should have been on that platform, Rosalind Franklin, who died in 1958, age 37. Her meticulous experimental work in 1952 had supplied the essential X-ray crystallographic data that Watson and Crick used, without her knowing at the time, to get out the structure. Nobel prizes are never awarded posthumously;... (From the profile by Horace Freeland Judson at p. 78, celebrating the contemptible and charmless opportunist, James Watson, who at 77 got the face but not the fate he deserved - hideous!) |
Farewell, Rosalind Franklin:
Theories for Everything
An Illustrated History of Science from the Invention of Numbers to String Theory
Hardcover
By champion science writers John Langone, Bruce Stutz, and Andrea Gianopoulos
| Quote: | ... Watson and Crick seemed stymied. (Linus) Pauling in California appeared to be gaining ground, returning to his helix. In a lab not far from Crick and Watson in England, (Rosalind) Franklin was getting very close to bserving DNA's structure in her increasingly explicit diffraction images. (At the crystallography laboratory at Birkeck College, London, Rosalind Franklin investigated the molecular structure of the tobacco masaic virus. She discovered that ribonucleic acid (RNA) was a single strand rather than the double helix found in the nucleus of other organisms.) Crick and Watson had consulted with Franklin, but their relationship was far from a collaboration. Female primary investigators were rare in science laboratories in those days, and in fact they were often not even allowed to eat in university dining rooms with their male counterparts. Personality conflicts had estranged Franklin and Wilkins, so she was working very much on her own.
Although the stories differ as to how it happened, at some point Wilkins gave Crick and Watson copies of Franklin's images. They realized - as she already had - that the molecule's shape was a spiral or a helix. The model came into focus: DNA was made of two long, helix-shaped sugar-acid strands, wound around each other like spiral staircases, each step another paired chemical goup of atoms. For their work, Crick, Watson and Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. None of them acknowledged the part played by Franklin, who had died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37. (-- p. 294) |
Best science documentary ever!
Me and Isaac Newton
DVD
Directed by Michael Apted
Featuring *1988 Nobel Prize winning chemist Gertrude Elion, who reminiscences none too fondly about her career as a pickle-tester, one of the better offers made to women chemists in the farty '40s
| Quote: | | Gertrude Elion patented the leukemia-fighting drug 6-mercaptopurine in 1954 and has made a number of significant contributions to the medical field. Dr. Gertrude Elion’s research led to the development of Imuran, a drug that aids the body in accepting transplanted organs, and Zovirax, a drug used to fight herpes. |
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editor
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| Posted: Sun Aug 09, 2009 11:50 am Post subject: |
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Magic Seeds
Book 2 of Half a Life
Hardcover
By Nobel Prize winner 2001 V.S. Naipal
| Quote: | Willie said, "I don't see what I can do. I don't know where I can go."
"You've never felt there was anything for you to do. You've never understood that men have to make the world for themselves."
"You're right."
"Don't talk to me like that. That's the way the oppressor class thinks. They've just got to sit tight, and the world will continue to be all right for them."
Willie said, "It doesn't help me when you twist things. You know very well what I mean. I feel a bad hand was dealt me. What could I have done in India? What could I have done in England in 1957 or 1958? Or in Africa?"
"Eighteen years in Africa. Your poor wife. She thought she was getting a man. She should have talked to me."
Willie said, "I was always someone on the outside. I still am. What can I do in Berlin?"
"You were on the outside because you wanted to be. You've always preferred to hide. It's the colonial psypchosis, the caste psychosis. You inherited it from your father. You were in Africa for eighteen years. There was a great guerrilla war there. Didn't you know?"
"It was always far away. It was a secret war, until the very end."
"It was a glorious war. At least in the beginning. When you think about it, it can bring tears to the eyes. A poor and helpless people, slaves in their own land, starting from scratch in every way. What did you do? Did you seek them out? Did you join them? Did you help them? That was a big enough cause to anyone looking for a cause. But no. You stayed in your estate house with your lovely little half-white wife and pulled the pillow over your ears and hoped that no bad black freedom fighter was going to come in the night with a gun and heavy boots and frighten you."
"It wasn't like that, Sarojini. In my heart of hearts I was always on the Africans' side, but I didn't have a war to go to."
"If everybody had said that, there would never have been any revolution anywhere. We all have wars to go to.(From the chapter entitled, The Rose-Sellers, at p. 5) |
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| Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2009 9:43 am Post subject: |
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Hugo!
The Hugo Chávez Story from Mud Hut to Perpetual Revolution
Hardcover
By Bart Jones
| Quote: | While Chávez was free to roam the country, he was also broke. He was nearly forty. He had no job, no bank account, no place to live. He owned almost nothing. His military career was finished. His only income was a monthly pension from the army of about $170. He sent it to his three children and his wife, Nancy, whom he was in the process of divorcing. Their relationship, while not hostile, had long since withered.
After their release from jail, some of his comrades decided to make ends meet by joining the system they had tried to overthrow two years earlier. Arias Cardenas accepted a job from President Caldera running PAMI, a government milk program for pregnant women. Urdaneta happily took a post as Venezuela's consul in Vigo, Spain, where he stayed the next five years. Chavez would have nothing to do with it. Unlike Urdaneta, who was relieved at avoiding twenty-five years in jail, Chavez refused to thank Caldera for signing his pardon. He would not even meet with him. Instead he denounced the administration as more of the same corrupt elitist rule that had destroyed the country.
Barely six months out of jail, Chavez publicly warned Caldera of more violent outbursts unless he addressed the nation's deepening social problems. After the arrest of four MBR-soo sympathizers, Chavez accused the president of trying to crush his movement. He challenged Caldera to put him in jail, too. "I'd bet to see who lasts the longest, Caldera at Miraflores or me in any prison cell in the country," Chavez boasted. (From On the Road, p. 190) |
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| Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 10:59 am Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
Shakespeare's Wife
Hardcover
By legendary feminist scholar Germaine Greer
| Quote: | The cost of production having been assessed at about 6s 8d a copy, the retail price can hardly have been less than about fifteen shillings. As Stanley Wells points out: 'The publishers' investment in a massive collection of play scripts was a declaration of faith in Shakespeare's selling power as a dramatist for reading as well as for performing. The declaration of faith and the investment may not after all have been the publishers'. If the publication was subsidized, the print-run could well have been small. In 1633, William Prynne was scandalised to notice that 'Shakespeare's Plays are printed on the best crown paper, far better than most Bibles,' which suggests that for someone cost was no object. Wells credits Hemmings and Condell with the actual editorial work; they commissioned a scribe called Ralph Crane to copy 'a number of plays specially for the volume' and chose 'which printed editions and manuscripts to send to the printer ... copy which must have been a printer's nightmare.' What is obvious from the appearance of the First Folio is that a house style has been imposed on all this disparate material, which suggests to me at least that the editors did not take the risk of giving the printers jumbled papers or leaving them to impose a house of style of their own. So far-fetched is the idea that Shakespeare's widow might have hired an amanuensis to prepare an edition of her husband's plays that no one has ever considered it.
As a widow Ann Shakespeare was entitled to make a will. If we could find it, and her inventory, we would know once for all whether she died a penniless dependant or whether she left money in trust to be spent on further publishing of her husband's work. If she did she would have left her executor no choice but to make available any funds remaining for a de-luxe second edition before he himself was gathered to his eternal reward.
All this, in common with most of this book, is heresy, and probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice. Ann Shakespeare cannot sensibly be written out of her husband's life if only because he himself was so aware of marriage as a challenging way of life, a 'world-without-end bargain.' The Shaespeare wallahs have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women, and have then vilified the one woman who remained true to him all his life, in order to exonerate him. There can be no doubt that Shakespeare neglected his wife, embarrassed her and even humiliated her, but attempting to justify his behaviour by vilifying her is puerile. The defenders of Ann Hathaway are usually derided as sentimental when they are trying simply to be fair. It is a more insidious variety of sentimentality that wants to believe that women who are ill treated must have brought it upon themselves. The creator of Hero, Desdemona, Imogen and Hermione knew better. Ann might say like Lady Macduff:
I have done no harm. But I remember how
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defence
To say I have done no harm? (IV. ii. 75-80)
(From Chapter Twenty-One, pgs. 355-356) (Tireless footnotes omitted) |
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| Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 3:01 pm Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
Burn This Book
Hardcover
Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison
| Quote: | | I have had my own experience as that of being a writer given evidence of a disaster which seemed to exceed all measure. In South Africa racism in its brutally destructive guises, from killing in conquest to the methodology of colonialism, certified as Divine Will by religious doctrine, took the lives of thousands of Africans and stunted the lives of millions more, systematically. I grew up in the Union that came out of wars for possession between the British and descendants of the Dutch, the Boers. The Africans had already been dispossessed by both. I was the child of the white minority, blinkered in privilege and conditioning education, basic as ABC. But because I was a writer - for it's an early state of being, before a word has been written, not an attribute of being published - I became witness to the unspoken in my society. Very young I entered a dialogue with myself about what was around me; and this took the form of trying for the meaning in what I saw by transforming this into stories based on what were everyday incidents of ordinary life for everyone around me: the sacking of the backyard room of a black servant by police while the white master and mistress of the house looked on unconcerned; later, in my adolescence during the '39-'45 War, when I was a voluntary aide at a gold mine casualty station, being told by the white intern who was suturing a black miner's gaping head wound without anesthetic, "They don't feel pain like we do." (From Witness: The Inward Testimony by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, pgs. 109-110) |
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| Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 4:19 pm Post subject: |
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Men Confront Pornography
Hardcover
Edited by Michael S. Kimmel
| Quote: | Pornography is not just men looking. It is men producing images for men to consume. And consume it we do. In 1984, for example, 200 million issues of 800 different hard- and soft-core magazines were sold in the United States alone, generating over $750 million.
And most of the images produced by men to be consumed by men are images of women. In 1970, the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography found that 90 per cent of all pornographic material is geared to male heterosexuals and 10 per cent is geared to male homsexuals, and that consumers of pornography are "predominately white, middle-class, middle-aged married males." Though today more women are both producing and cosuming pornography, and men always appear in gay male pornography, the percentages probably remain comparable, I'd estimate that now male heterosexual pornography might compose 80 per cent of the market, with that for gay men constituting 15 per cent, and for women, the remaining five per cent. ...
To some women, pornography is, in the words of Susan Brownmiller, "the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda." To these women, pornography graphically illustrates the subordination of women in our culture. And what is particularly objectionable about pronography is that it renders this brutal subordination so that men can experience sexual arousal and pleasure from it. Pornography, as John Stoltenberg puts it, "makes sexism sexy." And they feel it is a major cause of men's violence against women - especially rape. As Robin Morgan wrote, "Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice."
Other women ... have claimed that pornography has helped them to break away from the traditional passive definitions of women's sexuality and to claim a more active, vital sexuality. ...
... I think that men have been the silent spectators in the debate about pornography because, quite simply, we don't know what to say. ...
... Men need to raise the issue, to examine the role of pornography in our lives. A lot is at stake. Although most pornographic images are of women, pornography is, at its heart, about men. It is about men's relationships with sexuality, with women, and with each other. It is about women as men want them to be, and about our own sexual selves as we would like them to be. Whether or not pornographic images determine our sexual behaviors, there is little doubt that these images depict men's fantasies about sexuality - both women's sexuality and our own. ...
Feminist writers such as Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, Susan Griffin, Catharine MacKinnon, and Robin Morgan have also confronted the traditional liberal idea that pornography is protected by the First Amendment right of freedom os speech. Their argument is that pornography is not freedom of expression but itself a form of censorship: Pornography silences women, suppresses the voices of women's sexuality, constrains women's options, and maintains their subordination in a male-dominated world. We live, they argue, in a culture in which simulated (or real) rape, mutilation, torture, or even murder of a woman are routinely presented to men by men, with the intention (and effect) of making men experience desire, of turning men on, of eliciting erection. ...
If a man's freedom of speech requires the silencing of women, there is nonly partial freedom and surely no justice. Pornography "is not a celebration of sexual freedom," writes Susan Brownmiller, "it is a cynical exploitation of female sexual activity through the device of making all such activity, and consequently all females, 'dirty.'" Pornography is "designed," she continues, "to dehumanize women, to reduce the female to an object of sexual access, not to free sensuality from moralistic or parental inhibition." Pornograhy does not represent a liberating breath of free sexuality in the normally stale and fetid air of conservative censoriousness; it is only the sexualization of that traditional patriarchal world. Pornography is not rebellion; it is conformity to a sexist business-as-usual. (From Introduction: Guilty Pleasures, pgs. 1-15) |
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| Posted: Wed Nov 04, 2009 4:21 pm Post subject: |
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From Loaded Dice:
Gyn/Ecology
The Metaethics of Radical Feminism
Paperback
By Mary Daly
| Quote: | ... From the witch trials, brought about by the bonding of theologians and legal specialists, to the Hearst trial effected by the bonding of secular theologians (psychiatrists) and attorneys, the dis-spiriting process is essentially the same. Whereas the christian cross glorified suffering as a means to purification and ultimate joy in the "Afterlife," the contemporary secular sadomasochistic gospel proclaims that female suffering is joy. Thus even the agony of Patty Hearst was perceived by many as "a rich girl getting her kicks."
A Rolling Stones billboard atop Sunset Strip in Los Angeles in 1976 depicted a woman (Anita Russell) with hands tied together and legs spread apart, accompanied by the words, "I'm Black and Blue' from the Rolling Stones - and I love it!" The anonymous authors of a 1977 Time article entitled, The Sexes: Really Socking It to Women (Feb. 7/77), paternally discuss some gimmicks of "kings of kink" who admittedly seek revenge against women. With Timely detachment they write of the men who shoot photos of women mutilating themselves, and describe the men who design albums with pictures of women chained, women hanged, women gang-raped. Predictably, they find a woman psychiatrist who is willing to claim that all of this corresponds to masochistic fantasies of independent women. (footnote omitted) Thus the rape of the female mind / will, the message of the Virgin Mary's impregnation by the holy ghost, is repeated and completed in the "joyful" secular S and M resurrection of the torture cross. (From Dismemberment by Christian and Postchristian Myth, pgs. 94-95) |
On the constant bombardment of obscenity:
| Quote: | ... Although some women on some occasions have the "privilege" of being directly addressed by such names as cunt or pussy, most of the time this language is used in all-male environments. Yet it is the common male view of all women and, although most women do not hear it directly, we receive the message in a muted way. It is conveyed through silences, sneers, jeers, excessive politeness, paternalistic praise and disapproval, aggressive physical contact (an arm around the shoulder, a pat on the behind), invasive stares. ...
Moreover, women are conditioned to pretend not to hear/see the constant and violent bombardments of obscenity, for we have been taught the lesson that since verbal violence is a "substitute" for physical assault, we should be grateful for such seemingly mild manifestations of misogynism. ... Exorcising this invasive presence requires acknowledging its existence and refusing to shuffle. (From Spooking: Exorcism, Escape, and Enspiriting Process, pgs. 323-324) |
On the military's special use of obscenity:
| Quote: | Male authors have provided ample evidence that the bonding of androcratic aggressors is established and maintained through the fabrication of misogynistic symbol systems. Thus, George Gilder, author of a confused and arrogant book supposedly dealing with feminism, becomes quite explicit when discussing his own sex. He writes of training in Marine Corps boot camp:
From the moment one arrives, the drill instructors begin a torrent of misogynistic and anti-individualist abuse. The good things are manly and collective; the despicable are feminine and individual. Virtually every sentence sentence, every description, every lesson embodies this sexual duality, and the female anatomy provides a rich field of metaphor for every degradation.
When you want to create a solidary group of male killers, that is what you do, you kill the woman in them. That is the lesson of the Marines. And it works. (footnote omitted) (From Sparking: The Fire of Female Female Friendship, pgs. 357-358) |
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| Posted: Fri Dec 04, 2009 10:38 am Post subject: |
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From the Will to Win:
The Anarchists' Convention
and Other Stories
Hardcover
By John Sayles
| Quote: | "So you haven't quit yet, Leo."
I tell them it's a matter of hours and look for Sophie. She's by Baker, the Committee Chairman this year. Always the Committee Chairman, he's the only one with such a streak of masochism. Sophie's by Baker and there's no sign of her Mr. Gillis.
There's another one makes the hip act up. Two or three times I've seen the man since he set up housekeeping with Sophie, and every time I'm in pain. Like an allergy, only bone-deep. It's not just he's CP from the word go - we all had our fling with the Party, and they have their point of view. But Gillis is the sort that didn't hop off of Joe Stalin's bandwagon till after it nose-dived into the sewer. The deal with Berlin wasn't enough for Gillis, or the Purges, no, nor any of the other tidbits that started coming out from reliable sources. Not till the Party announced officially that Joe was off the Sainted list did Gillis catch a whiff.
Maybe he's a good cook.
She lights up when she sees me. That smile, after all these years, that smile and my knees are water. She hasn't gone the Mother Jones  route, Sophie, no shawls and spectacles, she's nobody's granny on the candy box. She's thin, a strong thin, not like Diamond, and her eyes, they still stop your breath from across the room. Always there was a such a crowd, such a crowd around Sophie. And always she made each one think he was at the head of the line.
"Leo, you came! I was afraid you'd be shy again." She hugs me, tells Baker I'm like a brother.
Sophie who always rallied us after a beating, who bound our wounds, who built our pride back up from shambles and never faltered a step. The iron she had! In Portland they're shaving her head, but no wig for Sophie, she wore it like a badge. And the fire! Toe-to-toe with a fat Biloxi deputy, head-to-head with a Hoboken wharf boss, starting a near-riot from her soapbox in Columbus Circle, but shaping it, turning it, stampeding all that anger and energy in the right direction.
Still the iron, still the fire, and still it's Leo you're like a brother. (-- pgs. 25-26) |
Listen:
| Quote: | Selected Shorts from Symphony Space
Audio Cassette Only!
An uproarious live event featuring Linda Lavin reading Grace Paley's Christmas classic, The Loudest Voice, and Jerry Stiller, whose delivery of the Sayles title story is the stuff of comedy legend! |
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