My mother died last October, on Friday the 13th. I put off buying my ticket for the dedication because it meant the anniversary was close. Now it’s close enough that the seasonal signposts are telling me it’s almost here. The Halloween decorations around the neighborhood remind me of a walk we took looking at them with the kid on her last visit.  The butterfly bush in the yard of the house we had just moved into is blooming and attracting the fake monarchs like it was on that visit. Even the silly signs for ComicCon remind me of the storm troopers that came by the pizza place where we ate what may have been the last restaurant meal we shared. And even the hellacious news cycle: trying and then failing to avoid the Kavanaugh hearings I’m reminded of when I logged on to my social feeds after being away for the funeral and saw, for the first time, a ripple of two-word posts from friend after friend whispering #metoo, mixing my private grief with private and public pain.

When my mother and I disagreed about politics it was mostly a matter of temperament: her liberalism was born of her desire to believe the best of those in positions she was raised to respect, especially academics and scientists. She saw my more radical distrust of institutions as a kind of cynicism, I think. I think of how hard she tried to follow the rules, how she would have liked to have been a scientist or a lawyer and likely would have if she had been born a little later, and how much she revered the well-educated, and the spectacle of the assholes who are running things is that much harder to take. As a radical I think there’s something illuminating and potentially useful about the emperor’s new clothes moment we are in; as a daughter, it’s breaking my heart.

The joyful milestones, too,  are tied up with the anniversary: the baby who was born six weeks after her death seems to have arrived yesterday, and seems to have always been here. Since October 13th has been forever and less than a day. I told a friend recently I feel like grieving is another item on my to-do list I’ve been avoiding. I haven’t read the books everyone suggests. But as Grace Paley once wrote, it’s possible to write about anything but ” the slightest story ought to contain the facts of money and blood in order to be interesting to adults. . . blood — the way people live as families or outside families or in the creation of family, sisters, sons, fathers, the bloody ties. Trivial work ignores these two facts.” In other words, you don’t have to go looking for mothers, whether in your writing or in your life: like death and money, they are everywhere in any conversation worth having.

In my fiction writing classes we start by reading “Borges and I” and talking and writing about our names: who we were named for, different names we have been called, if we feel like our names describe us. It’s a good way to get students engaged and a good trick for me to learn their names.

My mom loved talking about names. She didn’t love Abby – she thought it made her sound older, of her mother’s generation.  She noticed when it came back as a baby name and she started to hear it in grocery stores. She tracked my older son’s name on the Social Security site to see if it was coming back. I never called her “Abby” or anything but mom but now that seems like the right name to call her. Abby, your new grandchild is named Abraham, for you. Eli is at a new school he loved where the principal is named Abbe, with an E. You would have found that variation interesting. The butterfly bush is blooming. We’ve fixed up the house. Abby, I don’t believe the world is as good as you thought it was and I am wavering in my belief in how it can mend and what role I can play in the mending, but on this October 13th I may go to synagogue or I may take Eli to karate and I will go to the school fair in the park and I will take some pictures of Abe I will think I should send to you before I remember.

Susan Watkins on Feminist History: In a recent issue of New Left Review, editor Susan Watkins has an extremely comprehensive essay called “Which Feminisms.”  

As someone interested in the history of feminism and the left, I’ve long been frustrated by how ahistorical discussions of feminism are, not just in the mainstream but in a lot of left discussions as well. I’m also often frustrated by the free-floating use of “liberal” or “neoliberal feminism” without reference to an actual organizations or formations. Sheryl Sandburg and Hillary Clinton are terrible, but it’s not enough to say so.  And, of course, despite all the calls to intersectionality, most of our understandings of the movement, including mine, are embarrassingly U.S.-centric.  I’ve been wanting for a long time to read something that went into the history of how certain parts of the movement of the 60s and 70s were institutionalized and how these institutions shaped the movement internationally.

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When I was a kid I sometimes watched a show my dad liked called The Prisoner. It takes place on an island that gets a new ruler each episode, referred to as “number 2.” (You never find out who #1 is). Every episode the main character tried to escape the island and every episode he was brought back in a big clear bubble. In one episode, he made a boat that he disguised by taking it apart and putting it in art exhibit. He calls it “escape.” But what does it mean, a guard at the exhibit asks. It means whatever you want it to mean. 

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For the past couple years I’ve done some kind of traditional year end round up: last year we spent Christmas writing his and hers books we read list; the year before I rounded up my favorite articles.

This is not that kind of list. 2017 wasn’t that kind of year, or any kind of year I know how to recognize. Aside from the ongoing shit show on the world scene, it’s been a year of personal changes that seems almost comical in fulfilling the idea that there are years where nothing happens and months where everything happens: I got promoted, got married, got pregnant, moved, had a baby, and my mother died unexpectedly. All of this has made for reading that as been more scattered and fragmented but also more periodically more intense and visceral than usual. I find myself more desperately clinging to something that give the illusion of permanence, or at least gives a vantage point from which to reflect on impermanence. For a while I was trying to train myself not to look at my phone when I was with my kid on the playground; when I got antsy I would try to recite the first twelve or so lines of Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking. I never got beyond those 12 lines, but this year I have been turning more and more to poetry.

The best best-of lists always have the air of achievement: I got through this many serious books, or read that classic I always meant to. This year was the first year I didn’t make my “goal” of reading more books than I had the year before since I started keep comprehensive lists in 2013.  I’m willing to cut myself some slack on this given what this year has been.  Poetry and living with poetry takes me away from thinking this way; finishing a poetry book doesn’t feel like something to cross of the list- it’s easy enough to read them quickly, but you don’t want to if they are working.  I’ve been thinking about living with poems in that way we tell our students reading poetry will help them do. I have them memorize or imitate or translate poems as a way of “living with.” For me, teaching can be a way to “living with” – my sense and memory of them blur with comments students have made over the years, I track their changing reactions and my own. As with writing, they float through the categories: things I am thinking of teaching/writing about, things I have taught/wrote about, things I remember only because I once taught/wrote about them.

Towards that end, a few of the poems I’ve been living with:

1. Adrienne Rich, “On the Burning of Paper Instead of Children,” 

Rich starts this meditation on language and suffering with a quote from Daniel Berrigan, the radical priest who is also the source of this poem’s title, which is taken from his statement about an action in which a group burned draft files with homemade napalm. From there Rich goes to a scene of schoolboys burning Algebra books to scenes from the cruelties recorded in libraries and scenes from a never to be recorded love affair. Along the way it’s a meditation on the sanctimony of liberal dogma about the value of writing and explores the possibility that some pages must burn so that other pages – and other people – might live. In a time where there are too many conversations about whether and how the times are really worse than those we read about in books, I keep going back to these lines:

there are books that describe all this
and they are useless

You walk into the woods behind a house
there in that country
you find a temple
built eighteen hundred years ago
you enter without knowing
what it is you enter

so it is with us

no one knows what may happen
though the books tell everything

2. Grace Paley, “People in My Family,” 

I got to hear Paley read once, not too long before she died in 2007, at NYU, at an annual Spanish Civil War veterans event, back when some of them were still around also. Paley and Rich linger large and together in my mind, feminist, poets, and thinkers somewhere between my mother’s and my grandmother’s generation, and not incidentally, both mothers themselves. This was one of the poems she read that night, also about generations and what they have and don’t have to tell each other and whether we are supposed to have “hope” for children:

The ninety-two-year-old people remember
it was the year 1905
they went to prison
they went into exile
they said    ah     soon

When they speak to the grandchild
they say
yes     there will be revolution
then there will be revolution     then
once more     then the earth itself
will turn and turn and cry out     oh I
have been made sick

then you     my little bud
must flower and save it

3. Marge Piercy, “My Mother’s Body,” 

For the obvious reason. The specifics of Piercy’s poem have nothing to do with my mother, but it’s always been one of my favorite elegies. I once read about two thirds of Piercy’s many, many books because I was writing an encyclopedia entry on her and I was struck by what an unusual writer she was: a model of workman-like prolificness she attributed to her working class background who was also an activist and radical. Once again, the question is generations, though here it is only one who can speak: the left behind daughter sho must speak of the now-gone, only covertly politicized or self-realized mother, but also just a beautiful account of the hollowed out places where loss comes to visit us:

4. Linda Pastan, “Ethics,” 

One more woman poet of this generation. If I may. I think I first saw a copy of this in Adrienne Rich’s papers, and I love it for embodying one of the things that made me come to poetry – how you can have a fragment of an idea, a tangential connection that’s not meant to be something larger and decide it gets to be something, all on its own.  I remember versions of the Ethics 101 pseudo-profound game she mentions here. I was at camp, I think, and we were charged with deciding which character we would take in a lifeboat based on two line descriptions. I remember that one of them was a pregnant woman and the counselor desperately trying to avoid the inevitable abortion debate that one led to. No one said, the whole premise of this thing is crap, no one’s life is more valuable than another, and even if it were, would you really want to leave it a bunch of kids?

In any case, the perfect respite to  “the wasteland is worth five old ladies”:

This fall in a real museum I stand
before a real Rembrandt, old woman,
or nearly so, myself.  The colors
within this frame are darker than autumn,
darker even than winter — the browns of earth,
though earth’s most radiant elements burn
through the canvas. I know now that woman
and painting and season are almost one
and all beyond the saving of children.

5) Frank O’Hara, “Animals”

Because it can’t all be loss and struggle, this wonderful ode to youth. I teach O’Hara a lot in both Creative Writing and literature classes and students usually love it and it works well for imitation and memorization. As long as something like New York, something like sex, or something like youth exists I think it will work.

My life has generally gotten better over the decades, so I always wear my nostalgia with an asterisk, but at a certain point you realize you feel that way about your youth not because it was great just because it was yours. Or, why not imagine you had O’Hara’s? Short enough to quote in full:

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

I wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

Like everyone, since November I’ve been looking to strike the right balance between staying informed and active and staying focused and sane. I tell students to find an issue they care about and really focus on it: it doesn’t matter if it’s “the most important” necessarily but if it’s one they have a community or personal connection to and can find the right organization/community to plug into, that will be the most effective.

Of course, like most teachers, I’m terrible at taking my own advice, so I’ve been focusing not on one but on three main areas, in my writing and teaching and small bits of activism, and I’m going to try to catalogue some of the most useful writing I’ve found to think about where we are in these struggles.

Feminism/Women’s Strike

My own writing has been focused on this area in the last few years, and was particularly glad that, in tuned with the Women’s March and women’s strike, there were more and more pieces that saw feminism in the context of social movements: as something that has a history, strategies, tactics, and goals, not as something people “are” or “aren’t.” Along with the great social movement scholar Mark Engler, I wrote my contribution to this here, looking at the strategies of 70s feminism that created a whirlwind for mass social change and how they might be replicated today.

Although written several years ago, this piece by a nursing home worker was the most powerful reflection on the women’s strike for me. It reminded me of the most vital work of the period I’ve been writing about: fearless about describing the dehumanizing powers of injustice, drawing on both personal experience and analysis. During the 70s, feminists talked a lot about finding names for things that had been previously described as just life: names like “Sexual harassment” and “domestic violence.” Today, those who come up with feminism as part of the air have terms like “care work” and “second shift” at hand, but sometimes we don’t square the circle back to what these terms feel like day in day out. This piece brings that home in a devastating way.

Contra the click-bait headlines, in my experience having been pregnant and now being a mother have not made me an ounce less radical or pro-choice. (It made me more anti-capitalst for sure, but that’s a story for another day.) What it did do is make me think different about the way I “consume” stories about the pain of others, and it made me a ton more sympathetic to people who need to shut things out for their well-being. Another example of a piece that’s personal without losing an ounce of its analytical and political force, this piece by Dani McClain,   an invaluable reporter on Black Lives Matter among other things, takes on the disparities in outcomes for Black mothers and their babies, with a particular eye to how the stress caused by discrimination plays a role. A great piece on a neglected and crucial issue.

Sanctuary

I’ve been enjoying Sarah Jaffe’s interviews for the resistance a great deal. So many “what we should do” pieces take place on a level of polemic and abstraction don’t feel useful to anyone who’s tried to do any hands-on organizing, no matter how modest. In trying to plug into and understand the sanctuary movement through my work at a college with a huge immigrant population, this interview with Aly Wane of BAJI gave me one of the strongest senses of history of how we got here through the Obama years and where to go.

One challenge of understanding the sanctuary issue is to understand the real difference of policies from place to place without letting relatively progressive cities with official sanctuary policies off the hook for how policing still feeds the deportation machine. In the case of NYC, this piece by Jarret Murphy gave the fullest overview and outline of who controls what levers I’ve seen.

On Palestine 

Someone I love dearly once told me that, based on his experience, you shouldn’t get active on Palestine unless you want it to be the only thing you do. Since I’m as bad at taking loved one’s advice as I am taking my own, since the Gaza assault of 2014, which I couldn’t look away from, I’m done my best as an active member of Jewish Voice for Peace. I don’t consider myself and expert and so don’t write about this much, but I’ve been trying to read more and encourage other folks to be more vocal. In my experience, it hasn’t been true that any speaking out on the issue instantly puts a target on your back, but I know that’s different for people with different levels of visibility.  Right now, with Trump’s soul mate Bibi feeling more emboldened than ever, there’s as always, a danger of Palestine getting lost in the shuffle.

I sometimes call Brant Rosen, a crucial figure in making space for a non-Zionist Judaism, my “in-spirit” rabbi. This piece on the Right of Return and why so many Jews resist it so forcefully has been especially clarifying.

Finally, continuing the theme of personal pieces that are intellectually powerful. (I wish there was a way to state this that didn’t sound like it was surprising that these things might go together, but it’s also the case that a lot of internet writing that claims powerful space for the personal fails to do this, but that’s also a post for another day.) My NYC-JVP comrade Asaf Calderon has a piece in Haaretz about what it’s like to have a family member you never met who participated in the atrocities that founded Israel:  “Remember Mordechai, because genocide has a face. Humans commit massacres, not demons. Remember his family, my family, and the love and loss of his mother, because grief knows no judgment. Remember his victims, those whose names we know and those that we will never know. Remember the Nakba.May he rest in peace, and may we all find peace, when his victims’ relatives are allowed return, reparations and justice.”

On this day in 1965, a young father and devout Quaker named Norman Morrison set himself on fire underneath the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara  to protest the Vietnam War.

In her essay about her trip to Hanoi, Susan Sontag would remember that nearly everyone she met would make a point of telling her that they loved American people, it was only the government that was the enemy. As evidence they would talk about their admiration for Morrison, whose picture she found the taxi drivers had attached to their dashboards.

On August 31, 1970, Kate Millett appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Probably this was the first, last, and only time the cover of Time has featured some one who became famous for a feminist PhD thesis turned book. The cover story was actually a group of articles – along with the central piece there was a profile of Millett’s life as an artist, and a pair of “pro/con” essays on feminism by Gloria Steinem and Lionel Tiger. The main article too, zig zags between pro- and anti-feminist statements, often quoting anonymous “average” people representing different viewpoints without much connective tissue. The mockery of feminism we’ve come to expect is there, but so is a sense that something big is happening and Time is struggling to keep up, trying to make sense of it all and walk a middle line when none may be available.

If the Time pieces tell us a lot about how the mainstream was struggling to respond to radical feminism, it couldn’t encompass much about the book itself, which, like Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex, and Celestine Ware’s Woman Power, both also appeared in 1970, mixed disciplines and tones for a mix of scholarship and polemic, marked above all by the scope of their ambition. Sexual Politics is structured in three main parts, with the first and last devoted to critiques of authors who were darlings of the counterculture for their sexual frankness, including D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and, of course, Norman Mailer. These are the parts most people talk, but the middle section is the real heart of the argument, as she traces an overall pattern of liberation and backlash from the nineteenth century onward. It includes comprehensive readings of a range of Victorian authors from Ruskin to the Brontes. I’ve always known about the Nazi’s pro-natalist ideology but the first time I ever about the specific policies the Nazis implemented to turn back feminist progress, like instituting university quotas, was when I read Kate Millett.

Norman Mailer may have thought she was coming for his balls, and Irving Howe may have sneered at her “middle class mind,” but reading the book, you can’t help but feel that her real sin was actually taking what she’d been taught seriously, actually thinking that literature isn’t a parlor game but actually has something to say about the world.

Sadly, the mixed bag of the August 1970 coverage was better than what was to come. In December of the same year, they ran an article called “Women’s Lib: A Second Look,” which attacked Millett’s bisexuality as a way to attack the movement. Many of her later books deal with the personal fall out of her time in the spotlight and her struggles to continue to work as an artist. In 1998 she wrote an essay called “Out of the Loop and Out of Print” and she wondered in response to the latest “who killed feminism” tone, how an out of print author could do that.

Since then, there’s been more attention to the books and Sexual Politics in particular, with a new edition in 2000 and another one earlier this year along with some interesting pieces about Millett and her relevance.

But in an odd way, I think, the weird back and forth of the August Time piece, reflects something no retrospective can: the feeling of instability, that everything is up for grabs.  To my mind what was present in 1970 and was lacking so long after (and perhaps seems to be coming back now) was not a reverential sense of the “power of literature” as many retrospectives focus on.  It’s the intellectual ambition, idiosyncratic nature of books like Millett’s, Firestone’s and Ware’s, all of which blend disciplines and tones, mixing critique and utopian longing.

Norman Mailer certainly had some sense of that when he devoted a whole book, The Prisoner of Sex, to attacking Millett. The high-Mailerism is on display of course – he refers to himself in the 3rd person and comparing including statistics in writing to thinking about laundry lists while fucking. And yet, his actual response to Millett is not much different from the mainstream: he concedes pretty much the whole of the liberal demands for economic equality, but lamenting the more radical claims for “a cultural revolution and a sexual revolution.” If this is revolution, he notes, maybe he’s not a revolutionary after all.

“This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again,” James Baldwin, Mailer’s one-time friend with whom he argued with perhaps a little more respect but little more understanding, had written in 1955. In 1970, it seemed even to Mailer that the world was no longer male, and would never be male again.