Author: Liz

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Em duas linguas: B. Trayner

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I was just reading Beverly Trayner’s blog, and realized she links to one of my dusty old blogs ( a little embarrassing) where I was keeping my working notes for a project on bilingual poetry. She’s talking about some great stuff – being in two languages, being a blog chick, and getting round the rules with one half your mind while following the rules with the other.

So on the one hand I am Beverly the duh-sent who goes through the motions, never upsets the status quo and talks of Bolonha, internationalisation, insucesso escolar and always cumprirs as regras.

At the same time I am also Beverly the Blog Chick who dabbles in being international, entrepreneurial and pedagogic and who knows how to get round all the rules just like any other Chica Esperta. It’s the Chica Esperta who does and who makes things happen.

So far I’ve not been very adept either at keeping the rules, nor at getting round them. But organising my identity between Duh-sent and Chica Esperta Blog Chick is proving to be an empowering experience.

I love that, what she says about organizing her identity. It IS empowering. That’s just what I’ve been trying to do. And it’s also what Doris Lessing was writing about in The Golden Notebook, and Joanna Russ in The Female Man. We end up with “different selves” because of our multiple roles as women, and maybe because of the pressures of … well, a certain impossibility of integration, or suspicion that integration of our selves would mean the erasure of part of the self that is loved and valued.

As I continue doing huge amounts of poking-around and researching and blog-reading and note-taking, for the new BlogHer site — I’m writing about Latin American women’s blogs — I keep noticing women popping up in multiple identities, newly linked in the last year or so, just like me and my web presence… Gabby of La lesbiana argentina, hooking herself up with her other self at Pont des Arts; Dr. Kleine with a wild and woolly blog at En nombre del BLOG and then her polished essays at Olganza; Iria Puyosa with Rulemanes and Reste@dos. There’s so many more, but those are the ones I’ve read the most of.

It seems to happen as a fragmentation over time and then a re-linking or coming-out (or outing) process.

I wonder if it will become more normal to have the ability to dig into the personal lives and personal blogs of people who have professional status in nearly any field? You don’t necessarily want to know about your dentist’s sex life, but you might like to know about their opinions and experiences as a dentist. You might want to only know their professional front. But… if we consider the possibility that we are not bigoted, and people have a lot of personal freedom, and we assume as human beings that everyone around us has a rich, strange interior life, why NOT have their personal voice, their intimate thoughts they’d like to reveal on a friendly level, why NOT have them be knowable. That voluntary openness, and deliberate fragmentation and organization, is very powerful. Of course it’s not always comfortable.



WoolfCamp – blogging and writing

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The date for WoolfCamp has been set! It’s a writing-blogging-creativity-DIY retreat in Santa Cruz:

I invite you, Dear Readers and Interested Parties, to WoolfCamp, Winter 2006, Saturday, 2/18 and Sunday 2/19:

Behold, our tee shirt/schwag logo and image of our muse, Virginia Woolf, Her Very Self.

The “camp” concept is based on the barcamp and brainjam innovative models of conferencing- cooperative, participatory, zero bureaucracy, zero power tripping, total immersion, big fun.

Historically, these camps and jams have been geek-based. WoolfCamp will differ in providing a focus on the creative aspects of blog content. The goal is to help each other with writing on our blogs, in whatever form we wish to explore – memoirs, creative non-fiction, fiction, poetics.

And if a geek or two wants to join up and help me decide, once and for all, on which RSS feed I should be using, that geek will be welcomed.

If you’d like to come, sign up on the wiki, or send me email for help signing up.



outrageously erased

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Today in the library I meant to write up a formal description of my anthology project, but instead skimmed through biographical dictionaries.

I checked out several huge fat multi-volume dictionaries of Latin American authors, and some other Spanish-language Encyclopedias of Famous Women. It was interesting to see patterns emerge. Some encyclopedists knew a fair amount of Cuban women writers, but missed all the Chileans. Others got the Argentinians and Uruguayans, or knew about certain of my own favorites like the Venezuelan poet Enriqueta Arvelo Larriva, or massively famous feminists like Adela Zamudio, but missed the Cubans entirely except for Gomez de Avellaneda. *Everyone* was blind to the very strong groups of Guatemalan women writers. Some of the encyclopedias who knew the Matamoros-Borrero-Xenes circle still missed Emilia Bernal, or perhaps left her out on purpose for being too scandalous – I have no idea.

Sainz de Robles’ Diccionario de Mujeres Celebres, 1959, was strong on international and historical references. I’d enjoy reading all of it someday. If I found similar books from 1900 or so, and simply read them through, I’d understand these women’s poetry better. I’d see their references, just as reading a historical review of Sappho-myths helped me understand the poetry of Mercedes Matamoros and Nydia Lamarque. And just as my somewhat random knowledge of Norse mythology clued me into understanding Juana Borrero’s poem about Ran’s daughters.

Anyway, I studied patterns, took notes, xeroxed some things, and added considerably to the short biographies of many of the poets.

I enjoyed skipping around in Cesar Aira’s dictionary of authors. The appendices, which listed writers by country and then by birthdate, looked extremely useful. Though he missed quite a lot of the women I think are interesting. I like to think that he just didn’t know about them – rather than that he knew them but rejected their work as inferior.

Then I got into a terrible history-of-literature book, Literatura Hispanoamericana, volume 5 of an enormous and authoritative-looking reference series, Historia de la literatura española. It’s from 1969, and its author, Professor A. Valbuena Briones, included only one woman in his 600-page review of five centuries of Spanish-American literature, and it was… wait for it…. who do you think? There are only two possibilities and it is unimaginable to leave one of them out. It was Gabriela Mistral! He left out Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. Fucking incredible… of all the people you’d think it would be impossible to erase. I kept looking through the index in dismay and finally flipped through the books’ opening chapters. Nope! No Sor Juana! I still hope I’m wrong. It keeps my faith in human nature going. The Valbuena B, he’s an amazing guy. I started having flashbacks to my classes 20 years ago in the Spanish department at University of Texas… maybe those old fossils had learned off that very book. Since The Valbuena had huge bibliographies that made it clear he had at least opened the flyleaf of many fine books that had women in them, we have to think that perhaps he is the distillation of many filtering layers of sexist anthologizing and critical reviewing, so that all the times that women writers were shunted off into the last paragraph of the last chapter of the book finally came to a head, like an enormous, gross zit, and popped, leaving nothing for Valbuena Briones to work with. He didn’t even have the obligatory section of “mention a couple of women while putting them down and lamenting that they aren’t better and there aren’t more of them” which I notice in so many literary doorstops of the 20th century.



Making lists and breaking aesthetics

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Marilyn Hacker said on the WOMPO Women’s Poetry mailing list recently:

If, as feminists,we can’t discuss racism openly, if not “comfortably,”
then what did all the feminist writers who were discussing it in the 70s ,
and those doing so now –Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toi
Derricotte, Alicia Ostriker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marilyn Nelson, Joy Harjo,
Marilyn Chin, Elizabeth Alexander, Jane Cooper, Rita Dove, Irena Klepfisz,
Alison Joseph, Jan Clausen, among others — — accomplish ? There
are a lot more African American poets, Asian American poets, poets of
color, published now, enough of them that they don’t have to conform to
any kind of mold or expectation , political or formal — and yet that
change doesn’t seem to have changed the consciousness of many women whom
I’d have expected to have READ those poets and thought about what they’d
read.

Yes, exactly!

I note that it is important to go on making lists like this and telling people what to read. Lists of names make paths and entryways for people who need the guidance. As readers, we can’t rely on any sort of established power structure to represent diversity.

I also note that reading widely with an open mind needs to come first. THEN break and re-form your aesthetics and your poetics. In other words, upper class white people with the education that goes with it can’t impose the aesthetics they’ve developed from that background onto what they read from who are not just like them Keeping your tired old privileged aesthetic is like saying that beautiful meaningful things can only be built with legos. Maybe Legos made of gold, but still — so limited!

*** A rant I’ve been wanting to make for a long time***

I’m thinking of a particular incident with a person who happens to be quite powerful at the moment. I’ll call him Mr. Darcy. A few years ago, Darcy was just on the cusp of coming into that powerful position. I was tagging along to an event with my friend Martin, a poet and translator. Darcy, Martin, and I ended up hanging out over coffee. I didn’t register on Darcy’s radar as a person… a mohawked callow youth, perhaps Martin’s unaccountably freakish girl-of-the-minute.

And Darcy proceded to trash and eviscerate the idea of multiculturalism and political correctness. “Yeah, I make my anthologies and put in the really good poets, and then have to throw in some crappy PC person, and be all multicultural…” He spoke the names of some people of color with venomous bitterness and derision. I began to speak up to say that if he didn’t like those particular writers, he should look further into the latino, black, vietnamese communities to find ones that he did like, because the ones he was referring to weren’t necessarily the best by my judgement either… When I said this, it was as if a dog had spoken, an unexpected miracle. I talked about some ideas of poetry-of-inner-city communities poetry in public places, at bus stops, etc. And he got mad, saying that what people needed was to learn about real poetry, like Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman, and only the classics of American poetry should go up at those bus stops to force “real culture” on “those people”. He said the same sorts of things about modern women poets, including dissing on “confessional” “disgusting” “PC” women. (Who should also get a forced dose of Dickinson; almost enough to make one hate Dickinson… almost…)

I was shocked that Darcy would be so open about his bigotry — to someone like me, someone who clearly did not agree with him — He assumed, maybe, that I was a person it was safe to be bigoted in front of — that I would be complicit, even after I spoke up and argued with him. That purple mohawk radical feminist or not, I could be ignored or co-opted.

I am now grateful for this moment of my own invisibility on Darcy’s power-map. From his dismissal of my importance, his figuring that I didn’t matter, and his willingness to expose his own “pride and prejudice” in front of me, I learned some crucial and ugly things. I studied his anthologies to see the “presentable” face of racism and privilege, now armed with the knowledge of its unguarded scorn. Darcy’s anthologies never picked the poets of color who had been around, who were part of a tradition. Instead they would pick a short inferior work by someone very recent, the youngest person possible… Darcy behaved as if he could safely assume there were no traditions, no leaders, no communities, but only isolated examples he could safely tokenize and encapsulate… in short he only saw mediocrity in work by people of color or women, because he didn’t look deep…and then he actively promoted that vision of their mediocrity. This kind of tokenism harms everyone. I look back into anthologies all through the 19th and 20th centuries, and see the same pattern.

I still have trouble believing the depth of Darcy’s ignorance or his active malice, whichever was foremost in the operation of his racist, sexist aesthetics.



When Ran's daughters meet

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Oh happy synchronicity! I opened my juicy new “Poesía moderna en Cuba” and right smack in Juana Borrero’s short bio:

Debido a esta doble cualidad de pintora y escritora, y la pintura, y a la precocidad de su geniio, Julián del Casal la compara con la fascinadora María Bashkirseff, cuyas analogías se acentuan despueés con la muerte temprana de nuestra poetisa.

My sister just gave me a ratty old volume of Marie Bashkirseff’s journals (translated) which I devoured whole… Of course, I love to make the connections of who knew of whom and of course it makes sense that Borrero and her sisters would have known about Bashkirseff. And Bashkirseff wrote about Madame de Stael and George Sand, and other women who were inspirations for her. There was a hilarious day when she made her bumptious country cousin from Russia, who was in love with her, read Corrine… as if to say “And if you can take that, you might begin to understand the tiniest part of my little fingernail…”

I haven’t yet gotten my hands on the volume “Grupo de familia”, which collected work by several of the Borrero sisters, edited by Aurelia Castillo. I translated a few of Juana B.’s poems, and some of Aurelia’s, and I’m reading some of Dulce María Borrero’s. Others by Mercedes Matamoros, Nieves Xenes, and another Xenes sister make it clear that their poetic circle was not always focused on Julian de Casal as its center. The women read each other and wrote poems to each other. They read work by women from other countries and times. It seems important to say this, because most of the critical writing, the short bios, and the prefaces of anthologies, speaks as if de Casal was The Influence on everyone of that circle.



how long it takes to make connections

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I was coalescing vaguely this morning about the length of time in a woman’s life that it takes her to make connections with other women. Because of the ways tokenism works, if you’re sort of “successful” in the male-dominated world then you’re cut off in some ways… the isolations of nuclear families also factor in…

So I notice in feminist utopian fiction the women hit a point later in life where they start connecting. They get into the secret menopause club and all talk to each other. Like in Suzette Haden Elgin’s “Native Tongue”. I could make lists of books that show this pattern.

Maybe that’s what blogs and the net are changing. We find each other earlier in life. We get reinforcement and like-minded ideas, we can go further in thought because we don’t have to keep starting from the beginning in our explanations.



Gender and genre

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As I continue reading Latin American literary criticism from the 20s and 30s onward, I keep noticing that critics often decide that women poets missed the genre bus. A critic will launch into a discussion of modernismo, and then mention at the end of the chapter that some women were writing, but they are really Romanticists who came to the party years too late. That in 1910, no respectable poet would still be writing in a Romanticist tradition; poetry has evolved beyond that. And then later, that in 1930, no respectable poet would still be writing in a modernismo tradition, because now the new thing is different.

As if only one genre could exist at a time, and as if there were a model of evolutionary progress. Literary Darwinism. And as if there weren’t fuzzy boundaries, as if even a single poem didn’t have multiple traditions feeding it – not to mention the entire body of work of a poet who might write in many genres, many styles.

But then, in a strange twist; the same critics lament that there was never a great woman Romanticist poet, never a real one who was Romanticist to the core; never a true poet of modernimso.

I see the same thing in science fiction. Oh, it’s too bad women don’t really fit “the genre” — don’t write “hard sf”. (Despite all the ones who did, and still do.) But then when they do… Well, of course when women start doing it, they’ve missed the bus; they’re out of date, they’re stuck in the past, they’re no longer the cutting edge. We men have already plumbed that genre to its depths and discarded it and we have our Great examples. We’ve gone somewhere else to redefine the center of power, now that you women have come.

And I begin to believe the same is true of the “where are the masterworks” argument. (Which is now happening, heatedly, on the WOMPO list.) Where are the masterworks by women throughout history? Where is our female Dante, Homer, Shakespeare? This question always asked as if there could be no possible answer except pity that the terribly sexist conditions of the past precluded women ever acheiving something great. How inassailably logical! Always, we are on the cusp of Now; because of the recent advances in women’s rights and education, we might, someday, hope to acheive a masterwork; the problem is, this arguement has been around for hundreds of years at least. It’s always almost. It’s always as if the problem were new and the carrot were just out of reach. And … this is a big fat lie. And women, if you buy into that lure of Now Almost Maybe and it might be you who surfs the new thing into the open arms of important history; well you’re actually screwing over the women of the past in order to eliminate some competition, you’re elbowing other women out of the way in a roller derby you aren’t going to win, because that token position is a shaky one. Be careful what you’re buying into.

It is very instructive to look at the ratio (As Beth Miller does in her essay “El sexismo en los antologías”) of women to men in anthologies over a long time period. We need more studies like this, with charts and data analysis… To make the patterns and process more obvious to everyone.

I remain convinced that not only are the masterworks out there (one small example – I’d put the Heptameron up against Boccacio any day) but there is something wrong with you definition of masterwork if you think they aren’t.

And I’m also convinced that one solution is to redefine genres. I like my idea of maenidismo as a genre. It fits so well. Redefine and recreate genres in which women’s work is central, is the core. In science fiction, we have some of that with the push to define a canon for feminist speculative fiction. But I’d like to see more thought and discussion; more genres invented. Perhaps the beginning is to take the work by women, and put it all together, and look for patterns, create groupings, look for movements and feedback loops. Then define the genre. THEN look and see if there’s any work by men that might half-way begin to fit in that genre.

I wonder if anyone else has used this approach? Probably; but it’s a new thought to me and I’ve been developing it for many years. It goes beyond the creation of women’s anthologies and studying work by women only. Create genres and traditions, and then let in men’s work halfway, as tokens. This avoids pure separatism, and the ghettoization that seems to accompany it. Even if this doesn’t “work”, with the ripple effects of power that I’d like to see, well, then it ends up functioning like other gender identity-based efforts and anthologies; as pockets for information and women’s work to be preserved for future rediscovery by people like me, which is maybe the best we can hope for.



status report, Art 21, Waverley readings

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I’ve been sandblasted by the “holidays”, with not much leisure! Writing continues, but what critical thinking still is possible has been directed towards the SF book award I’m helping to judge.

Still… poetry! I’ve found some wonderful poets to translate, including Olga Acevedo, Marí Luisa Milanés, and María Antoneta La-Quesne. I came across a really inspiring book by Catherine Davies,A Place in the Sun? Women Writers in Twentieth-Century Cuba, and ordered it for mulling-over outside of the library halls. Here it is on my kitchen table, thanks to online used-book ordering! I’m totally drooling to read the whole thing instead of just a few chapters – and want to nerve myself to write to Davies.

It’s hard to do that! But it helps so much. I want to be like all the women who have helped me immensely, writing me long detailed emails and directing my attention… who will never be paid for it. One thing I can do is to resolve to pass it on, and try to behave that way myself to others – to be helpful and respectful, and never obstructionist, competitive, or dismissive. (Because I’ve run into that attitude too, of course!) Also, I want to make my work the best it can be…

But onwards! Tomorrow, Friday at 7pm, is the Waverly Writers open mike at Friends Meeting House, Colorado, Palo Alto. It’s usually 25-30+ poets, each reading one poem, to a group of perhaps 50 people. It’s a good slice of poetry in the peninsula, but I would say it leans heavily towards the white page-poet… I have yet to untangle who is in whose factions or has been in the same workshop for decades or who shared a poetry mentor 15 years ago, etc. All of which is interesting politics that seethes below the surface. I take notes on the poetry, and have great interest in following the poets’ development over the last few years. And don’t let my comment on “politics” scare you, because it’s a warm and welcoming group, very accepting of personal difference and of varying poetic styles.

Next Friday, Jan. 13th, is the reading at the Art21 gallery in Palo Alto. Its crowd intersects with Waverley’s but is not identical. This reading tends to be 30-ish people; the gallery is spacious and pleasant; there’s often jazz musicians who participate; they’re a fun, friendly crowd who buy books and bring wine and cheese to share (both of those things, the book-buying and the food, make one feel so loved! Not to be sneezed at!) I like to read translations there. Well, this month I’m the MC and organizer. Our featured poet is Serene, who I met at the Nomad Cafe in Oakland; I liked her rapid-reading approach and the books she quoted (I mean, who reads the feminist poet Alta, these days! I do! Me, me! and her too, huzzah!) I felt that her poetry would appeal to the peninsula poets and might shake them up a little bit. I also asked a few others… but it’s hard to compete with events on Friday nights in SF. So I think Serene will be the sole featured poet and then a break, then a lively open mike, and I look forward to doing fun introductions for everyone.

At both readings, there’s always some people from the Poetry Center San José, some from the Saturday Poets, and some from the Not Yet Dead crowd. Sometimes people come from over the hill, from Santa Cruz, including Len Anderson, whose brilliant parody of “Howl” — “Beep”, a history of Silicon Valley and personal computing, I gave to many people for Christmas this year — and we also get a spattering of people from Stanford, though I’m always surprised who doesn’t come… *cough*Stegnerfellows*cough*. Heh! More fool them, because they could sell their books, promote their work, and be in touch with the local poets, their natural base… and as I said, the friendliest people in the world…



Fitting and not fitting

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While I was doing my research I pretty much ignored Chile and in fact I have completely ignored Gabriela Mistral because I figure everyone else has written about her already, and she’s well known. Ultimately I have to go and read her poems and read something about her life – in fact, probably I’m being stupid and there’s a biography of her out there in English that would be easy for me to find, with pointers to lots of other good poets.

My poet this week has been Olga Acevedo, a Chilean born around 1895. Acevedo fits firmly with the other women I’ve been translating, all the ones who are “not quite modernists”. Well what if they’re not? Why not call them something else? Because there was definitely something. Why not call it a genre? For god’s sake.

My special favorite, Juana de Ibarbourou, doesn’t fit strict definitions of modernismo in her early work mostly because she’s not quite rigorous and formal enough. I read somewhere in an interview with her that until after her second book, she didnt’ even know what a sonnet was. She’d read plenty of them, and written them, but had never studied the rules of verse. (All the poets did not study the rules of verse, but the ladies DO roll their eyes.) She just DID it – but slightly “wrong”.

Back to Acevedo. I got very excited at her early poems. Acevedo mentions silence a lot. There’s a lot of not-speaking, and dot-dot-dot ellipses, ghosts and statues that can’t speak but who want to speak and paradoxically ARE speaking through the poem. The sort of poem that goes like this, “I’m totally mute, I’m a statue, I can’t speak! Oh, the sadness!” (Not an actual line.) It’s a beautiful rhetorical strategy that makes me aware of all the things they’re not saying. Despite my writing ALL THE TIME there is plenty I’m not saying and can’t say because of social convention or attempts to be private — and I don’t always feel comfortable with that. Show me a wall and I want to break it. Reflex! But these early 20th century women, their silent speaking statues are all talking to Rodó, in response to his essay “Ariel” in which a philosopher explains to his students (gatherred around a statue of Ariel) all about their duty as artists.

I wondered about the phrase “la tristeza de ser”, which was in quotes in Acevedo’s poem “Serenata”. Is it a quotation/translation from French? Or Kierkegaard? I could translate it as “existential despair” but I’m not sure if I want to be anachronistic if it’s an anachronism. If you’re going to say “sadness of being” you might as well say “existential despair”. Anyway, Acevedo’s angst is expressed thusly: She’s passionately addressing a ray of pure white moonlight as it streams into her room, and she wants to hide her face in its gauzy negligee and melt away into perfumed nothingness like a ravished bride. Hot stuff!

In other early poems by Acevedo, I noticed a lot of blue which is now a red flag, or really a blue flag, for me that something is going on about Art and Poetry with capital letters. Anything that’s blue, or anything about fountains or swans, and the poet is definitely talking to/about Darío and “Azul” — and so is addressing the ideas of modernismo; the poem should be read in the context of modernismo whether you “count” it or not in that genre. Pure art, inspiration, beauty — Beauty — as a way of being. These women, these adherents of maenidismo, saw themselves as living their lives as art. I feel like the more I read, the more I am in their dream-world. Edith Södergran is there — and the Comtesse de Noailles — and I’m sure so many more from other countries and languages. I want to put my Latin American women together with them in a lovely anthology, someday, to show the connections.

My own dreamworld is still this imaginary, beautiful data structure of all the texts in the world. I want it to be easy to see relationships between books. I want people to be viewable as nebulous clouds of text-production and consumption or maybe those are the wrong words; texts and people have conversations and relationships.

How much happier I am to be putting all this out into the world, instead of just in private notebooks! And not to be a lonely super-reader autodidact freak anymore. I mean, I still am, but the value of it is different once I’m not talking to the air.



Excerpts from Mitchison

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I’m glued to Naomi Mitchison’s wartime diaries, in a volume called “Among You Taking Notes…” I’d read her Memoirs of a Spacewoman and Travelling Light but until the amazing feminist scholar and reader Lesley Hall mentioned Mitchison’s non-fiction and diaries, I had no idea she was a renowned autobiographer.

To me her wartime diaries read like a blog. I get that same sense of intimacy, of the fullness of someone else’s life, without much exposition. I have to work to fill in gaps and figure out who’s who. (There is a handy glossary, and the book was edited well, with footnotes interspersed.) Apparently Mitchison was part of a project called Mass-Observation, which among other things got people to keep diaries during times of social change and war. I’m very curious about this project. She refers to it sometimes as “like therapy” so I wonder what her participation was other than to write the diary and mail it off to the Mass-Obs. people? There is mention that her diaries and letters were intercepted by the Home Office as a matter of course, read, copied by hand, and pertinent facts noted. “Shall remember that anything I say may be noted. I may be able to do a certain amount that way.” To note things on purpose that local people might need in hopes that politicians might help.

She’s in her early 40s… has 4 children off at school, a houseful of evacuees and refugees, in fact responsibility on some level for a townful of them, hundreds… writing… domestic and farming arrangements… poaching fish with the poachers for fun… and she lost her newborn baby, a heart defect, very sad. Her feelings about this recorded as faithfully as any mommyblogger’s. Occasional writerly crisis and freakout over the war, like this one from 7 Aug 1941:

I do feel like hell; it is partly being tired, partly that I feel so stupid; I can’t concentrate, I forget facts, I can’t read a serious book…. I make serious blunders about this war. I don’t know anything properly. If I’m no good I may as well do manual work and wear myself out, it doesn’t matter; I wish I knew if this was age or something physical or the beginning of some kind of mental decay or what. I so much want someone to be awfully nice to me for a long time. Oh someone that I love, stand up and crown me. And I get like screaming when all these girls talk at once. How can one write when one feels like that? I can remember now the things that Denny M. said to me yesterday about writing but what the hell; he is stupider than I am, it doesn’t matter what he says. It’s no fun being merely one-eyed in the country of the blind. Damn.

From someone so literate and hard-working and politically committed, a successful novelist, poet, and renowned intellectual, whose life was so full and who lived to be a hundred and one … It means a lot to me to see her low moments. It buoys me up not because of any schadenfreude at a successful person’s moments of pain, but because I know that these moments are inevitable and I shoudl not measure my own life by its low points. I admire Naomi Mitchison for her exposure of life’s messiness and complexity.

And that line, so beautiful, “Oh someone that I love, stand up and crown me.” Her diary entries are keenly perceptive of other women’s work, of women who are trying to have jobs or be writers or to survive and care for a family and whose work never ends, never has a stopping point or a congratulation, who “spend all their time caring for and petting others and who I would dearly love to pet as they are so in need of it.” Sometime during 1941 she noted that she would like to take everyone in turn in the village — a small herring-fishery village in west Scotland — and give them a day off in bed with tea and the nicest service. She agonizes over her own luxuries… I like her immensely.

Reading her diaries makes me think of E. Nesbit, Edward Eager, of course Narnia, and other childrens’ books that are steeped in 30s and 40s England and the changing times. The ways that wartime and post-war books have a lustful focus on what the children have for tea struck me as odd when I was little, until I realized there was a butter and sugar ration. And the morals of children in E. Nesbit focus around nobly helping, social levelling, and gender equity – because she was a Fabian and a socialist, a feminist and believer in free love. Like Mitchison seems to have been.

I was struck by this quote from September 1939, the start of the war:

I think one sees things more vividly, storing them up, insisting on the moment, at these times. If one is wise. During the last war, when I was a girl, I felt all the time that it was wrong ever to be happy; now I think one should be when possible. It was the kind of day one could carry into the trench or a concentration camp, in one’s mind…. We took care not to shoot the pheasants; it seems odd, when men are shooting one another in Europe, and when we may be much more directly involved in that ourselves, yet I htink it is probably a good idea to be punctilious at the moment about small and silly rules which are not part of this totalitarian plan which is eating us now.

Elsewhere she brings up the possibility that most democratic or humanist rights and freedoms, most civil liberties, will disappear during wartime; that it is in enclaves like her village with its discussion groups and Labour meetings and plays that ideas of freedom will survive. They won’t be in textbooks; newspapers were censored and suppressed. Italian, Austrian, and german immigrants and refugees were being interned in England and shipped to Canada or Australia. One ship with I think 1500 internees was sunk by a German submarine, crossing the Atlantic, full of Italians… her friend’s doctor and his wife were on that ship… It’s a good reality check to compare Mitchison’s take on WWII to the wartime we are in.

Where are the memoirs and histories now, right now, of the Muslim people being detained illegally by our own government? I hope they are on blogs and I’ll be able to find them and read them.

Mitchison often wonders about being detained or exiled or put in a concentration camp herself especially if England were invaded. I certainly think about it too for myself – the tide could turn very suddenly in the U.S. to a paranoid and totalitarian dictatorship, as our President says in public that he is above the law. How wistfully I think of Al Gore and his stiff yet heartfelt statements about “The Rule of Law” the day after the election was decided with transparent unfairness.