Good turnout, informative booth, friendly faces and enthusiastic bibliophiles flocking to our book empire's table! We'll be here til 3pm, library lobby off Red Square. Thanks TESC!
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Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Evergreen Internship Fair
Good turnout, informative booth, friendly faces and enthusiastic bibliophiles flocking to our book empire's table! We'll be here til 3pm, library lobby off Red Square. Thanks TESC!
Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Daily Bleed for January 20th, A Radical Anarchist Daybook
Our Daily Bleed...
Once upon a time |
JANUARY 20
EGON BONDY
Czech philosopher, writer, poet, underground activist.
FEAST OF THE KITCHEN GOD: Offerings made, beans tossed over roof.EVE OF ST. AGNES. John Keats wrote poem on the legend a maiden could retire on this Eve, & if she would lie very still, she would see a vision of the man she would marry."St. Agnes' Eve, ah, bitter chill it was!"It is supposedly one of the coldest nights of the winter.ST. PAULA'S DAY, celebrates a young girl saved from the passions of a pursuer by running into a church, where she grew a beard.Jewish: TU B'SHVATHeads Up Seattle, Washington: First of the month of PLURIOSE (rain) in the French revolutionary calendar.
820 -- Abu Abdallah M ibn Idris al-Sjafi'i Islamic dies (his Book of Motherpublished same year?).
1781 -- 
First edition of Pieter 't Hoens' Post of Neder-Rhijn is published. Main mouthpiece of the democratic movement in early modern Netherlands, with a surprising echo in the press of the resistance during World War II.
First edition of Pieter 't Hoens' Post of Neder-Rhijn is published. Main mouthpiece of the democratic movement in early modern Netherlands, with a surprising echo in the press of the resistance during World War II.
1798 -- Dorothy Wordsworth's Alfoxen Journal begins: "After the wet dark days, the country seems more populous. It peoples itself with sunbeams." The journal becomes a record of her brother's friendship with Coleridge that resulted in their Lyrical Ballads (1798), the beginning of the Romantic movement in English poetry.
1806 -- Writer/editor Nathaniel P. Willis, who founds the American Monthly Magazine in 1831, lives, Portland, Maryland.
1819 -- Lord Byron finishes Canto 2 of "Don Juan."
Lord Byron finishes Canto 2 of "Don Juan."
1847 -- Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Governor of Taos, New Mexico, killed by rebellious Mexicans during Mexican War.
1850 -- Poland:
| Strange Stuff: | Fall of caterpillar larvae after a snowstorm, Warsaw [All the Year Round, 8-253] http://www.resologist.net/damn03.htm |
1855 -- French composer Ernest Chausson lives. His Poème for Violin & Orchestra is one of the most popular in the violin repertory.
1860 -- England:
| More Strange Stuff: | Sound "resembling discharge of a gun high in the air" heard, near Reading, Berkshire [London Times, Jan 24] http://www.resologist.net/damn03.htm |
1862 -- Ooopsie?: General Felix Zollicoffer killed after mistakenly riding into Union lines.
1862 -- France: Augustin Hamon (1862-1945) lives, Nantes. Sociologist, who became an anarchiste along with Fernand Pelloutier, in 1893. Later became a socialist.
1869 -- During this month secret "Alliance" (International Brotherhood, or the Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists), founded in 1866 by the revolutionary anarchist Michael Bakunin, is dissolved.
1872 -- Filipino soldiers & workers stage a bloody revolt against Spanish rule.
1879 -- Great American modernist dancer Ruth St. Denis lives, Englewood, New Jersey.
RUTH ST. DENIS Patron Saint 2009-2011
Great American modernist dancer, breaker of social taboos.
1883 -- US: A passenger train stopped on the Tehachapi Summit slips its brakes & careens four miles down the grade, reaching a speed of 70 mph before derailing; wreck & ensuing fire kill 21, California.
1884 -- Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of A Soviet Heretic, & sci-fi allegory We, lives, Russia.
"When (in science, religion, social life, art) a flaming, seething sphere grows cold, the fiery molten rock becomes covered with dogma — with a hard, ossified, immovable crust.... Till one day a new heresy explodes & blows up the dogma's crust, together with all the ever so stable, rock-like structures that had been erected on it."
1885 -- First switch-back railway (roller coaster) patented.
1891 -- David Kalakahua, emperor of Hawaii, dies.
1891 -- Italy:
Even Mo' Strange Stuff: Luminous object or meteor in the sky, fall of stones from the sky & earthquake, Italy [L'Astronomie, 1891-154]
http://www.resologist.net/damn03.htm
1892 -- US: First basketball game played at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Friday, January 18, 2013
Thursday, January 17, 2013
How to Grow Up
He’d spent a lot of his life wishing he was stronger, a lot of life trying to be stronger: will was a muscle to be grown through exercise. Reluctance, a weakness to be overcome. He wanted a muscular soul.
It seems like he used the body as a metaphor for his psyche. Everyone knows what it means to be physically strong. Having a strong body means lots of muscles and lots of power vis-a-vis physics: you can lift heavy objects against pull of gravity, you can tear phonebooks in half despite the chemical bonds holding the glue and paper together. And you can do it without a lot of planning or skill: we talk about “brute strength” as distinct from grace or dexterity.
“Just do it.”
“No pain, no gain.”
He wanted a muscular soul, a self that could do anything without a whole lot of planning or skill or management or thought. He wanted thoughtless strength: like a locomotive, he wanted to ignore and blast-through all obstacles. Self-management was for pussies.
Somewhat older, he smiles ruefully at his younger self, like, “Really? Was that necessary?” He gets enough sleep. He schedules meals. He flosses. Instead of strength he just wants balance: he tries to act as a caregiver, and to regard himself as a ward. He avoids pain when he can, and when he can’t, he takes it in small doses and gives himself breaks. He’s proud for different reasons, now. He still exercises, but stops when it hurts. For the most part he no longer yearns for the machismo maturity of having seen everything, of laughing at pain, of never being surprised; and he’s reconciled to the tiny piece of him that still dreams that way, managing it like a difficult child or neighbor. It’s corny, but he’s allowed himself to love himself the same way he loves his mother. He’s no longer selfless.
He thinks he’s on the right track.
It seems like he used the body as a metaphor for his psyche. Everyone knows what it means to be physically strong. Having a strong body means lots of muscles and lots of power vis-a-vis physics: you can lift heavy objects against pull of gravity, you can tear phonebooks in half despite the chemical bonds holding the glue and paper together. And you can do it without a lot of planning or skill: we talk about “brute strength” as distinct from grace or dexterity.
“Just do it.”
“No pain, no gain.”
He wanted a muscular soul, a self that could do anything without a whole lot of planning or skill or management or thought. He wanted thoughtless strength: like a locomotive, he wanted to ignore and blast-through all obstacles. Self-management was for pussies.
Somewhat older, he smiles ruefully at his younger self, like, “Really? Was that necessary?” He gets enough sleep. He schedules meals. He flosses. Instead of strength he just wants balance: he tries to act as a caregiver, and to regard himself as a ward. He avoids pain when he can, and when he can’t, he takes it in small doses and gives himself breaks. He’s proud for different reasons, now. He still exercises, but stops when it hurts. For the most part he no longer yearns for the machismo maturity of having seen everything, of laughing at pain, of never being surprised; and he’s reconciled to the tiny piece of him that still dreams that way, managing it like a difficult child or neighbor. It’s corny, but he’s allowed himself to love himself the same way he loves his mother. He’s no longer selfless.
He thinks he’s on the right track.
Restaurant Review: Black Coffee (Seattle cafe)
On Cap Hill at the corner of Pine and Summit, just uphill from Bauhaus Coffee (map here), Black Coffee boasts wood floors fit for ballet, comfy leather (fleather?) chairs, a couch, and lots of pillows and board games. The lighting is comfortably dim while still bright enough to read by. There's a sweet balcony in which to hide with your comrades and plot the liberation of humanity. Maybe the best part of the atmosphere is the music: I enjoyed a cup of tea while listening to a Flaming Lips album I'd never heard before, and was amazed at what a relief it is to be in a cafe that doesn't have an endless infinite loop of Thelonius Monk, Yoshima Battles the Pink Robots, Christmas music, Beatles, or (I've actually heard this, and it was a rough as you'd expect) the Les Miserables movie soundtrack. Plus there're books--and not just the donated crap that cafes usually stock in a halfhearted effort to appear literary. You can peruse Camus, Dostoevsky, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, Orson Scott Card, William S. Burroughs, Gunter Grass. And Harry Potter.
Black Coffee's beans are from Kuma Coffee, a small Seattle roaster who operates through direct-trade with local farmers around the world. So far as your correspondent can suss out, direct trade is sort of like Fair Trade, but with more transparency, less bureaucracy, and less affluent-liberal hypocrisy. I didn't get a chance to taste it myself, but Snob Coffery's reviews (here) of Kuma consist entirely of praise and dessert-analogies. You can read in the Seattle Times about Kuma's direct trade, here.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
My turn shall also come: I sense the spreading of a wing. Osip Mandelstam
The Russian poet was born on this day in 1891.
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam[1] (Russian: О́сип Эми́льевич Мандельшта́м; IPA: [ˈosʲɪp ɪˈmʲilʲjɪvʲɪt͡ɕ məndʲɪlʲˈʂtam]; January 15 [O.S. January 3] 1891 – December 27, 1938) was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife Nadezhda. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to a camp inSiberia. He died that year at a transit camp.
Monday, January 14, 2013
If you can't go back to your mother's womb, you'd better learn to be a good fighter. Anchee Min
The author of Red Azalea was born on this day in 1957.Anchee Min (閔安琪; Mín Ānqí; born January 14, 1957) is a Chinese-Americanpainter, photographer, musician, and author who lives in San Francisco andShanghai. Min has published a memoir, Red Azalea, and six historical novels. Her fiction emphasizes strong female characters, such as Jiang Qing, the wife of Chairman Mao Zedong, and Empress Dowager Cixi, the last ruling empress of China.
Daily Bleed for January 14th, A Radical Anarchist Daybook
Our Daily Bleed...
"Those are my principles.
If you don't like themI have others."— Groucho Marx(ist)
What Happened on this day, in recovered history January 14
JANUARY 14
MILTON WOLFF
Last American commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
ROMAN NEW YEAR.
Suffolk, England: CAKES & ALE DAY, food to the poor.All Souls College, Oxford: MALLARD DAY, celebrating the discovery of an unusually large & tasty duck on this day in 1437.Hindu World: PONGOL OF THE COWS. Sacred animals are sprinkled with water, saffron, flowers & leaves of sacred plants; their horns are painted, garlands hung about their necks. With drums & cymbals they are driven through town with much festivity.FEAST OF ST. FELIX.
1601 -- Church authorities burn Hebrew books in Rome.
1699 -- New Old World: Witch One? Massachusetts holds day of fasting for wrongly persecuting "witches."
In a cold world woolly thinking is comfortable when worn next to the skin.
1742 -- Edmund Halley, genius eclipsed by Newton, dies at 86.
1784 -- Treaty of Paris, officially ending US War of Independence, ratified by Congress. By its terms, "His Britannic Majesty" is bound to withdraw his armies without "carrying away any Negroes or other property of American inhabitants."
1794 -- All in the Family?: First successful cesarean section in US, Edom, Virginia. Dr. Jesse Bennet performs it on his wife.
1818 -- Zacharias Topelius (1818 - 1898) lives. Swedish speaking writer, journalist, historian, whose writing career divides into three roles: story teller for children, describer of Finland & her landscape, & founder of the Finnish historic novel.
1836 -- French painter Henri Fantin-Latour lives. He was a friend of the Impressionist painters, but his style was more in the realist vein.
1841 -- The only woman artist among the prominent French Impressionists, Berthe Morisot lives.
1850 -- Germany: While held in the Königstein fortress, the anarchist Michael Bakunin is condemned to death by Saxon tribunal.Bakunin played a principal role in the May 3rd uprising with the famed composer Richard Wagner. The rebellion was crushed & Bakunin today is sentenced to die.
1850 --
Pierre Loti, whose themes anticipate some of the central preoccupations of French literature between the world wars, lives, Rochefort. His career as a naval officer took him to the Middle East & East Asia & provided ample material for his writing, starting with Aziyadé (1879) & Madame Chrysanthème (1887).
1858 -- France: Italian Nationalists led by Felice Orsini, a Free Mason, bowls three bombs under Napoleon III's carriage in front of the Paris Opera, killing eight bystanders & injuring 148. Orsini thought that killing Louis-Napoleon would precipitate a general popular revolution in France that would spread to Italy to expel the various foreign regimes then ruling the divided peninsula.
Beloved & Respected Comrade Leaders Empress Eugenie, only only slightly wounded, stepping from the wreckage of the carriage, was heard to comment,
1860 -- High Seas:
Strange Stuff: Fall of irregular-shaped pieces of solid ice of different dimensions, up to the size of half a brick, in a thunderstorm, upon Capt. Blakiston's vessel [London Roy. Soc. Proc., 10-468]
1862 -- Scotland:
BLACK RAIN: Fall of black rain, Slains [Rev. James Rust. Scottish Showers]
(Hmmmmm ... & you thought this normal in Scotland.... )
1866 -- US: Art Young, "Masses" cartoonist, lives Orangeville, Illinois. Daily Bleed Saint December 29.
1875 -- Albert Schweitzer lives, Kaysersberg, Alsace-Lorraine, Germany. Medical humanitarian, organist, historian of the apocalyptic enigmas of early Christianity & the end-times. Nobel Prize-winner, 1952.
1878 -- US: Supreme Court rules unconstitutional any state law requiring railroads to provide equal accommodations for passengers, regardless of race or color.
1882 -- Thomas Nast, in Harper's Weekly, lampoons Mother Shipton in a cartoon about the Apocalypse, for her false prediction that the world would end in 1881. Mother Shipton is England's most well-known prophetess, a British version of Nostradamus. Currently, about 100,000 people per year reportedly visit the Mother Shipton Cave in her home town, apparently seeing light at the butt-end of the tunnel.
1886 -- France: Louise Michel est conduite par la police au domicile que lui ont trouvé ses camarades, 89, route d'Asnières, à Levallois.
1886 -- Hugh Lofting, creator of the children's Dr. Doolittle series, lives, Maidenhead, Berkshire. Though avoiding the word "nigger", he referred to Africans as "coons", which is no better. Presumably neither was used in the movie.
1886 -- France: Peter Kropotkin, imprisoned for the past three years, is released from prison, on or about today, due to pressure from national & international protests. (I don't have the exact day — ed.)"In the middle of January, 1886, both Louise Michel & [Emile] Pouget, as well as the four of us who were still at Clairvaux, were set free..."
What we should talk about when we talk about abortion, pt. 2
In part 1 of this post, I wrote about the question of fetal personhood vis a vis abortion, and concluded since it's not at all clear when a fetus becomes a person, fetal personhood is a problematic criterion for whether or not an abortion is ethically okay. I also wrote that I don't think that fetal personhood should inform laws surrounding abortion, and in this post I'll explain my reasoning.
(I should note that women aren't the only people who can get pregnant; trans-men and other people outside conventional gender norms can as well. I wasn't sure how to write about abortion in a way that acknowledges this fact without putting long, irritating caveats on every sentence, so I opted for elegance over accuracy. Apologies to all for not finding a better solution.)
It seems conventional to discuss abortion-law in terms of fetal personhood: are they people or objects? At least that's been my experience, as a child and later as a student. But this is a particular way of framing the issue, which assumes that fetal personhood is the ethically relevant issue in abortion. Pro-life advocates speak of fetuses as "children" or "babies," waving giant pictures of adorable, thumb-sucking, 2001: A Space Odessey-esque proto-infants in utero and MURDER or PRO-LIFE in all-caps.
Of course, the question of whether and when abortion is ethical is distinct from the question, "Would you MURDER this slumbering, Muppet-like fetus?"
But both questions still focuses on fetal personhood as the ethically-relevant issue, to the exclusion of all other issues. Which tells us something important: that talking about fetal personhood is the conservative way of framing abortion.
In Don't Think of An Elephant!, George Lakoff explains how progressive and conservative worldviews derive from different family-based metaphors for thinking about larger human communities: conservatives use a strict-father worldview, in which the father must protect the family against evil in the world, provide for them, and teach his children (and wife, who's sort of like a child) to be good. Implied in this model is that it is the duty of children and wives to obey the father: disobedience amounts to evil, and the proper response by the father to disobedience is either punishment or, if that doesn't work, disowning the wayward child. (Progressives, on the other hand, use a family-model which emphasizes equality of parents, and casts responsibility and compassion as the primary virtues.)
If you accept the idea of a strict-father morality, then conservative opposition to abortion makes sense: it's less about protecting fetuses and more about control over women's sexuality. This conclusion is supported by the fact that the policies supported by "pro-life" advocates don't actually prevent abortions or save fetuses. As Libby Anne discusses here, countries with strong anti-abortion laws (e.g. in Africa and Latin America) tend to have high rates of abortion, while countries with wide access to birth control (e.g. in Europe) tend to have low abortion rates. Needless to say, the pro-life mainstream has little love for birth control. Poverty also seems to encourage abortion, and the stories about how the Pill causes 'mini-abortions' are false in several ways. In other words, pro-life policies encourage abortions, while pro-choice policies discourage them. This makes no sense if being pro-life is about saving fetuses, but is perfectly reasonable if being pro-life is about a worldview in which women who control their sexuality and reproduction are sinful sluts who deserve to be punished.
(Map from http://womenslawproject.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/abortionlawsmap.png.)
As Jacob Kovacs puts it,
Being pro-life is about controlling women, not about saving babies.
I've taken our discussion a bit afield from the original topic, which was "What are the ethically relevant issues around abortion?," but I have a solid rhetorical reason for doing so. I want you to see that the pro-life position is bankrupt. Not only does it rely upon the implausible concept of ensoulment-at-birth to argue that all abortions are unethical; it actively opposes policies which discourage abortion. Seen in the most charitable light, it is nonsensical; seen in a more cynical light, it's old-fashioned chauvinism in disguise. "Save the children!" is just an excuse for controlling women.
(I'm not suggesting, by the way, that pro-lifers are consciously lying when they say that they want to protect children. I'm suggesting that their real motivation is based in a particular worldview or schema, since their purported motivation makes no sense in light of their actual behavior.)
So we shouldn't talk about fetal personhood when we talk about abortion--or in any event, we shouldn't just talk about fetal personhood, and we should stop talking about it once we notice that it's too complicated to get us anywhere.
Instead, let's talk about agency. Let's talk about who should decide whether an abortion is ethically permissible instead of what that decision should be. Let's acknowledge that there may not be a straightforward answer to "Should this person get an abortion?" in every instance, and instead talk about who's in the best position to make that difficult call.
Once we start talking about agency rather than the misnomer of "life," it becomes obvious that the person who's facing pregnancy, the person who will have to go through the expensive, invasive, difficult procedure of an abortion, the person who will deal with the consequences of pregnancy or abortion--they should be the one to decide. Not their family or church. Not society. Not the moral paragons in Congress.
The woman should decide.
This is what we should talk about when we talk about abortion: agency, not fetal personhood.
(I should note that women aren't the only people who can get pregnant; trans-men and other people outside conventional gender norms can as well. I wasn't sure how to write about abortion in a way that acknowledges this fact without putting long, irritating caveats on every sentence, so I opted for elegance over accuracy. Apologies to all for not finding a better solution.)
It seems conventional to discuss abortion-law in terms of fetal personhood: are they people or objects? At least that's been my experience, as a child and later as a student. But this is a particular way of framing the issue, which assumes that fetal personhood is the ethically relevant issue in abortion. Pro-life advocates speak of fetuses as "children" or "babies," waving giant pictures of adorable, thumb-sucking, 2001: A Space Odessey-esque proto-infants in utero and MURDER or PRO-LIFE in all-caps.
 |
| THE STAR CHILD IS BORN! |
Of course, the question of whether and when abortion is ethical is distinct from the question, "Would you MURDER this slumbering, Muppet-like fetus?"
But both questions still focuses on fetal personhood as the ethically-relevant issue, to the exclusion of all other issues. Which tells us something important: that talking about fetal personhood is the conservative way of framing abortion.
In Don't Think of An Elephant!, George Lakoff explains how progressive and conservative worldviews derive from different family-based metaphors for thinking about larger human communities: conservatives use a strict-father worldview, in which the father must protect the family against evil in the world, provide for them, and teach his children (and wife, who's sort of like a child) to be good. Implied in this model is that it is the duty of children and wives to obey the father: disobedience amounts to evil, and the proper response by the father to disobedience is either punishment or, if that doesn't work, disowning the wayward child. (Progressives, on the other hand, use a family-model which emphasizes equality of parents, and casts responsibility and compassion as the primary virtues.)
 |
| Proof of liberal bigotry against elephantine persons. |
If you accept the idea of a strict-father morality, then conservative opposition to abortion makes sense: it's less about protecting fetuses and more about control over women's sexuality. This conclusion is supported by the fact that the policies supported by "pro-life" advocates don't actually prevent abortions or save fetuses. As Libby Anne discusses here, countries with strong anti-abortion laws (e.g. in Africa and Latin America) tend to have high rates of abortion, while countries with wide access to birth control (e.g. in Europe) tend to have low abortion rates. Needless to say, the pro-life mainstream has little love for birth control. Poverty also seems to encourage abortion, and the stories about how the Pill causes 'mini-abortions' are false in several ways. In other words, pro-life policies encourage abortions, while pro-choice policies discourage them. This makes no sense if being pro-life is about saving fetuses, but is perfectly reasonable if being pro-life is about a worldview in which women who control their sexuality and reproduction are sinful sluts who deserve to be punished.
 |
| Pretty sure that the US and the EU don't have identical laws on abortion... |
(Map from http://womenslawproject.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/abortionlawsmap.png.)
As Jacob Kovacs puts it,
1) That people’s morality shouldn’t be subject to government interference is a defining conservative belief.
2) That abortion should be restricted by law for moral reasons is a defining conservative belief.
This contradiction is reconciled if you define women as less than full people, less than full moral agents, on whose behalf it is downright necessary to intervene.
Being pro-life is about controlling women, not about saving babies.
I've taken our discussion a bit afield from the original topic, which was "What are the ethically relevant issues around abortion?," but I have a solid rhetorical reason for doing so. I want you to see that the pro-life position is bankrupt. Not only does it rely upon the implausible concept of ensoulment-at-birth to argue that all abortions are unethical; it actively opposes policies which discourage abortion. Seen in the most charitable light, it is nonsensical; seen in a more cynical light, it's old-fashioned chauvinism in disguise. "Save the children!" is just an excuse for controlling women.
(I'm not suggesting, by the way, that pro-lifers are consciously lying when they say that they want to protect children. I'm suggesting that their real motivation is based in a particular worldview or schema, since their purported motivation makes no sense in light of their actual behavior.)
So we shouldn't talk about fetal personhood when we talk about abortion--or in any event, we shouldn't just talk about fetal personhood, and we should stop talking about it once we notice that it's too complicated to get us anywhere.
Instead, let's talk about agency. Let's talk about who should decide whether an abortion is ethically permissible instead of what that decision should be. Let's acknowledge that there may not be a straightforward answer to "Should this person get an abortion?" in every instance, and instead talk about who's in the best position to make that difficult call.
Once we start talking about agency rather than the misnomer of "life," it becomes obvious that the person who's facing pregnancy, the person who will have to go through the expensive, invasive, difficult procedure of an abortion, the person who will deal with the consequences of pregnancy or abortion--they should be the one to decide. Not their family or church. Not society. Not the moral paragons in Congress.
The woman should decide.
 |
| George Washington explaining his own "struggle" with the ethical dilemma of abortion, to be followed by Thomas Jefferson on his "struggle" with the ethical dilemma of slavery. |
This is what we should talk about when we talk about abortion: agency, not fetal personhood.
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