19 Sunday Oct 2014
Posted in our family
We were supposed to travel this weekend, but Hanna was unwell so rather than push ourselves and land her with three weeks of pneumonia like last fall — that was fun! — we revised things and stayed in place. On Saturday morning we took our coffee and pastries (thank you Ula Cafe!) and went out to Forest Hills Cemetery to sit and read in the October sun. Continue reading
15 Wednesday Oct 2014
Posted in book reviews
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Ross Eliot with copies of ‘Babette’ (via GoodReads)
Back in the spring, I received a review copy of Babette: The Many Lives, Two Deaths, and Double Kidnapping of Dr. Ellsworth (2013) a memoir/biographical study by Ross Eliot. After six months of hectic life, I’m finally getting around to reviewing the book; my apologies to the author for my deleterious behavior.
In 1999, Ross Eliot was working odd jobs and taking community college classes in Portland, Oregon, when a member of the history faculty — Dr. Ellsworth — took an interest in him. In her seventies and living alone, Ellsworth was looking for someone to take up residence in a basement apartment and help out around the house, drive the car, and be a companion at meals as well as on frequent weekend excursions in exchange for room and board. Eliot accepted the challenge, and lived with Dr. Ellsworth, despite her many eccentricities, until a heart attack took her life in 2002.
Part memoir, part character study, Babette echoes such works as Alan Bennett’s essay “The Lady in the Van” (1989) or Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters (2005). Like its predecessors, Babette centers around the complicated, marginal life of an individual with whom the author had personal acquaintance — but whose personal life details elude complete or coherent understanding. All three of these narratives also involve troubling questions of ethical responsibility toward the stories of others, and challenging questions of power imbalances within such author-subject relations.
[mild spoilers after the jump]
13 Monday Oct 2014
Posted in our family
Hanna and I walked into the city center this morning via the Southwest Corridor Park, from Jamaica Plain to the Back Bay. Here’s a selection of images we took along the way.
The Southwest Corridor Park was almost a freeway.
Instead, neighborhood activists came together to stop the freeway & today
the Orange Line T / commuter rail lines run alongside a nearly 5 mile urban park. Continue reading
10 Friday Oct 2014
Posted in our family
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turtles on Jamaica Pond (May 2014)
Here in Massachusetts we’re looking forward to a three-day weekend in honor of some exploitative white explorers, some indigenous first peoples, and of course small, swift boats on the Charles.
Our plans include a lot of napping and reading. Maybe some long walks, used bookstores, libraries, and coffee shops.
In the meantime, here are some things I’d like to write blog posts about at some point:
1. I’ve been reading sociology books on home education lately — Kingdom of Children and Home is Where the School Is — and would like to write a post about unschooling at work (what does it look like to bring the values and structures of the unschooling ethos into a workplace?) and unschooling at adulthood (can you have a family that practices “unschooling” when you’re not raising kids? spoiler: I think you can).
06 Monday Oct 2014
Posted in linkspam
I had a two-day migraine last week and now seem to be battling a cold, so — suffice to say writing energy and focus is low, and time scarce. In the meantime, here’s some stuff I’ve been reading on the internet I’ve been thinking about when not following #teamharpy.
Jacobin Magazine recently published a bitter analysis of the forces of gentrification by Gavin Mueller that has returned my thinking to urban history and politics:
Gentrification has always been a top-down affair, not a spontaneous hipster influx, orchestrated by the real estate developers and investors who pull the strings of city policy, with individual home-buyers deployed in mopping up operations. …
“What choice do I have?” ask the liberal gentrifiers, if you press them a bit. “This is the only place I can afford to live!” This sums everything up perfectly, puncturing the bubble of individual choices that make up liberal politics.
You have no choice; everything’s been decided ahead of time. If you want the American dream of a middle-class life with a home you own in the city in which you work, you have few other choices than to join the shock troops of the onslaught against the urban poor. Align with big capital and the repressive state in the conquest of the city, and maybe you’ll have enough equity to send your kids to college.
Maybe because of the Jacobin piece, or because of the series on Uprooting Racism I’ve been doing over at the Amiable Archivists Salon, I’ve been thinking about gentrification a lot lately. This piece by Dannette Lambert on “20 Ways Not to be a Gentrifier” from the Oakland Local is always worth a re-read: Continue reading
27 Saturday Sep 2014
Posted in library life
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Two women in the library science world, nina de jesus and Lisa Rabey, are being sued for 1.25 million in damages. Why? Because they spoke up regarding the behavior of a fellow professional who appears to be a serial harasser — and refused to back down when he threatened them with a lawsuit.
If you feel safe doing so, please consider cosigning this open letter signing this petition to plaintiff Joe Murphy asking him to withdraw the lawsuit and seek an alternative path toward reconciliation.
If you are willing and able, please consider speaking up as a witness; a key aspect of defending one’s self against charges of defamation.
If you can afford to, please consider donating to nina de jesus’ and Lisa Rabey’s legal defense fund.
I’m not going to write a long blog post on the subject, because I have little to add that hasn’t already been said by individuals more articulate than I (particularly Meredith Farkas, Laura Crossett, Barbara Fister, and the Radical Librarians Collective). But I want to offer two reasons why I support #teamharpy in standing up to Joe Murphy’s aggression.
1) One day, it could be me. I’m a snarky, opinionated woman on the Internet. I have little patience for those who punch down and I have reason to believe I give a good tongue lashing — particularly when I have people to defend, including myself. If women are to be slapped with a 1.25 million dollar lawsuit for naming high-profile men in the context of sexual harassment allegations, a conversation that desperately needs to happen about sexual coercion and sexual entitlement — within the library science profession, apparently, as in the rest of our fucked-up society — will be stifled. And those who do speak will be forever looking over our shoulders waiting for that inevitable moment when we piss off the man who proves desperate, angry, or privileged enough to come after us with every tool at his disposal.
I stand in solidarity with the women who have spoken because there should never be silence in the library (or anywhere else) on this subject.
2) One day, it could be me. While this is a less likely scenario than the one above, I could also someday find myself faced with allegations that I sexually harassed a colleague. While I have every reason to believe I’m good at respecting boundaries, people make mistakes. Actions or words are misconstrued.
26 Friday Sep 2014
Posted in book reviews
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I promised myself no reviews of books I read during vacation, so instead of a booknote for the most invigorating Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies, and Revolution (Bloomsbury 2014) by Laurie Penny (aka @PennyRed), I’m going to offer up a couple of passages that spoke to me particularly in light of recent events.
If you want a more in-depth treatment, check out Rachel Hill’s piece at The Dish.
Or you could just read Unspeakable Things. And then pass it along to your FBF (feminist best friend) so s/he can read it. And then go kick some neoliberal ass.
[LiveJournal is] how I learned to write in public, in a way far more immediate, far more enticing and personal, than the blank, limited audience of the college newspaper could ever be.
I wrote to survive, but I learned how to be a writer online, and so did millions of other women all over the world. Ad not just how to write, but how to speak and listen, how to understand my own experience and raise my voice. I educated myself online. Grew up online. And on blogs and journals and, later, in the pages of digital magazines, I discovered that I wasn’t the only pissed-off girl out there. The Internet made misogyny routine and sexual bullying easy, but first it did something else. It gave women, girls and queer people space to speak to each other without limits, across borders, sharing stories and changing our reality. (157)
And on the dark side…
Although the technology is new, the language of shame and sin around women’s use of the Internet is very, very old. The answer seems to be the same as it always has been whenever there’s a moral panic about women in public space: just stay away. Don’t go out in those new, exciting worlds: wait for the men to get there first and make it safe for you, and if that doesn’t happen, stay home and read a book.
People learn to code by playing in coded space. We learn the Internet by being there, by growing there, by trial and error and risk-taking. If the future is digital, if tech skills and an easy facility with the Internet are to be as essential as they appear for building any kind of career in the twenty-first century, then what we are really saying when we tell girls and their parents that cyberspace is a dangerous place for them to be? We’re saying precisely what we’ve been saying to young women for centuries: we’d love to have you here in the adult world of power and adventure, but you might get raped or harassed, so you’d better just sit back down and shut up and fix your face up pretty. (165)
At the same time as girls everywhere are warned to stay offline if we want to preserve a paleo-Victorian notion of our ‘reputation’, we are told that sex and violence on the Internet isn’t ‘real.’ A robot can reach through the screen and grab your pink bits has not yet become a standard add-on with every laptop, so sex online can’t be real. Can never be coercive. (168)
Don’t let the “just stay away” brigade win. Speak. Write. Live in our networked publics. We are citizens of the world and are entitled — all of us — to inhabit our territory.
23 Tuesday Sep 2014
Posted in life writing
I was informed by the Internet that today is Bi Invisibility Day 2014.
So here I am. Being bi. And visible.
Like I am most days. Showering in a bisexual manner. Brushing my bisexual teeth. Biking to work bisexually. Bisexually offering reference assistance to researchers. Lunching on bisexually-approved pizza. Picking up my bisexual wife after work so we can indulge in public displays of bisexual affection.
This is what a bisexual looks like.
July 2014
Though of course most people don’t know I’m being bisexually visible. People who see me on the street unaccompanied probably assume I’m straight (unless I’m on a street in JP, in which case they probably assume I’m a dyke). With Hanna, they probably assume I’m a lesbian. Because as a culture we read people according to the gender of their partners, and we humans with our funny little categories have a rough time understanding folks whose desires don’t map neatly onto the binary system of gender we’ve invented for ourselves.
I don’t really care, most days, who people think I fuck.
But here’s the thing: Because of biphobia I spent the first 27 years of my life thinking I wasn’t queer enough. Because I liked dudes as well as dykes, and people of all shapes, sizes, and self-presentations were equally likely to make my squishy bits a bit more squishy. Continue reading
22 Monday Sep 2014
Posted in book reviews
I was excited to pick up A People’s History of the New Boston by Jim Vrabel (UMass Press, 2014) at our local branch of the Boston Public Library a few weeks ago; I’d heard about it through the Boston history grapevine and really wanted it to be good. It promised, in its opening pages, “to tell the other half of the story”:
It gives credit to many more people — women as well as men; black, brown, and yellow as well as white; the poor and working class as well as the well off. This story focused on how those people made Boston a more humane and morally better city (1-2).
Vrabel, a journalist and community activist, was involved in the very remaking of Boston that this narrative covers — the postwar struggles of a vacated central business district and “blighted” neighborhoods up through the community organizing of the 1970s and the unsuccessful attempts to desegregate Boston’s public schools. An inside observer, he is in many ways well positioned to write an accounting of grassroots change at the neighborhood level.
However, two major flaws make it difficult for me to recommend this work. The first is his near complete erasure of queer and feminist activism from his narrative (more below). The second, Vrabel’s nostalgia-ridden concluding chapters, a glossing of the present that ignores continued local agitation and sweat equity around affordability, equality, local control, and the role of city and state government in supporting or destroying communities. Continue reading
14 Sunday Sep 2014
Posted in our family
As this post goes live, Hanna and I are on our way to Northampton, Mass. to enjoy lunch at the Lhasa Cafe and a wander with friends in celebration of our second wedding anniversary.
I spent some of yesterday hanging art on our walls (finally!) including the framed tattoo concept drawings my father did for our wedding tattoos, and my sister-in-law Renee’s two landscapes — one painted in honor of her marriage to my brother (9/9) and one in honor of our marriage (9/14). We’ve hung them in a triptych on the bedroom wall (pictured above); they face this housewarming gift from my parents, who obviously know their daughter and daughter-in-law well: Continue reading
the feminist librarian 