"It's better now."

Shekhinah Mountainwater (1939-2007)

Books!

I just signed up to DailyLit, a site that sends you books (in handy installments) to your email inbox daily. Yes, one more way to read more! First up:

A Vindication on the Rights of Women

by Mary Wollstonecraft.

The Politics of Poverty

I'm not planning to blog much this summer; I'm spending most of my days hanging with The Kid and/or working on a project for RESOLVE Alberta. But I'm going to post a couple of the reviews/etc. that I've got hanging around my desktop. These will eventually be posted on the main site, once I finish the CSS changes.... which, at this rate, should happen sometime this fall.

Poor-Bashing: The Politics of Exclusion. Jean Swanson, 2001. Review originally published in the viec review 4(2), July-August 2003.

Jean Swanson, formerly of End Legislated Poverty (publisher of The Long Haul newspaper), writes from a place of experience, empathy, and activism. Her words are clear, as are her expectations: she wrote this book to challenge the notion of poverty in Canada.

Swanson’s analysis is detailed, especially when it looks at how the understanding of poverty has changed in the past decades. In one chapter, she contrasts “Income Security for Canadians”, a 1970 document which cited the importance of all persons having “an adequate income on which to live” and the role of the economy in supporting social objectives, with “Improving Social Security in Canada”, a 1994 document which abandons these ideas and instead extols the virtues of independence and initiative by individuals in their quest to rid themselves of poverty. In two short decades, she concludes, the blame for poverty has moved from the economy to the individual. This is consistent with the continual privatization and deregulation agendas of the provincial governments; there has been a complete shift in awareness, understanding, and expectation. It is in this type of climate that poor-bashing flourishes.

The simplicity of focusing on individuals in poverty prevents an analysis to develop around the conditions that keep people from employment, education and other dignities. Swanson cites Jo Grey, an activist with a Toronto anti-poverty group, in relation to this issue; instead of the continual “putting a face on the problem [of poverty]” sentiment that people have come to expect in media stories about poverty, Grey advocates for an analysis of the problem in the first place. Grey even coined a new word, poornography, to describe the “poor as victim” stories that dominate Canadian media; these stories re-victimize people in poverty as they reduce them to the category of “deserving” poor.

Swanson certainly does not shy away from the systemic issues: chapters include a look at the role of charities in poor-bashing, how people in poverty can self-bash, and what tools we can use to challenge poor-bashing as we encounter it. She is straightforward and does not hesitate in naming poor-bashing behaviour where she sees it. In the end, the reader is left not only with an enhanced awareness of poor-bashing behaviours, but also a variety of tools to use in challenging poor-bashing in its countless forms.

BookMobile 2.0

I've always loved libraries, and I've always thought bookmobiles are one of our greatest inventions. (The books come to me? Sweet!) So the idea of a Camel Library is just, well, sweeter still. (I think Lot, our resident camel, would approve.)

Writing Through the Pain

I've been reading Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance by Julia Cameron this weekend. (I plan to post a review when done.) She talks about writing/creating in the midst of stagnant periods and about locating the writer's craft within the context of "work" instead of seeing it as a mythical/muse inspired event. One quote that has stuck with me so far:

The doing of something productive regardless of the outcome is an act of faith. The doing of a small something when a larger something is too much for us is perhaps especially an act of faith. Faith means going forward by whatever means we can.

That has been especially important for me within the events of the past year. It has only been when I did the "small somethings" that I felt I was able to move forward. And the "small somethings" have, hopefully, been leading me to a place where I am able to take on more of the "larger somethings". Sometimes the "small somethings" appear to have nothing to do with writing or work: walking my recycling to the bin, taking a picture of the cherry blossoms on the tree outside my window, remembering cookies for game nights. But the mindfulness that I am using to change my world is the same mindfulness that I bring to my writing.

Perhaps, as I move forward in acceptance and healing, it will be the same mindfulness I bring to the "larger somethings" and to my life.

(And, amazingly, my shoulder no longer hurts. Perhaps writing through the pain isn't such a bad tool after all.)

451?

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch.

I'm not anti-Internet, by any means, and I think that there are more factors at work in the declining readership of the western world than the rise of the web. And, as someone who has had to make hard library weeding decisions and has worked in bookstores, I understand why many of these books were not able to find a home in libraries or bookstores.

However, that doesn't prevent me from being a little sad at this story. And wishing I could transport to Missouri and see if there's anything I could save, especially on the feminist herstory end of things. Of course, that would lead to the bookstore-library-song, and we can't have that again, can we?

Happy Towel Day!

"Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect?
There's a frood who really knows where his towel is."

Light a Candle

I was re-reading Writing a Woman's Life over the weekend (in preparation for the What Can You Do With a Women's Studies Degree? panel at the UofC today) and thinking about the amazing life of Carolyn Heilbrun, who committed suicide in 2003.

And I was thinking of our foremothers who have given so much to us: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nellie McClung, Marija Gimbutas.

And now another wild womyn joins them: Octavia Butler passed away on Saturday.

While reading posts on babble (rabble.ca) about Betty Friedan, who passed away on Saturday, I followed a link to an article by Germaine Greer in the Guardian. The tone of the article reminded me of the Anthony/Stanton/Gage relationship (and how it fell apart) and the time I read about Mary Daly's work being mainstream (without the lens of herstory). It's always interesting to see the "behind the scenes" of the feminist movement.

This sentence, though, has stuck with me for two days:

Betty believed that freeing women would not be the end of civilisation as we know it; I hope that freeing women will be the end of civilisation as we know it.

That sums up the difference b/t liberal feminism (iFeminism?) and radical feminism nicely, and I think it also explains why some of us believe that we've still got a long way to go, even if we did have a woman prime minister for a minute or two.