Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

In doing some research/writing I came across this (evidently famous) 1971 essay by Linda Nochlin (feminist art historian/theorist) entitled "why have there been no great women artists?". For Nochlin, the question itself is a problem:

The question "Why have there been no great women artists?" is simply the top tenth of an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception; beneath lies a vast dark bulk of shaky idees recues about the nature of art and its situational concomitants, about the nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and the role that the social order plays in all of this.

Once I'm through reading it, I'll post a little something on it, but I thought I'd pass it along to any who are interested.

As I understand the main argument, Nochlin is hostile (as am I) to the entire notion of a "genius" as it has been traditionally understood in history writ large. In fact, this notion is a product of the late 18th century, and took off in the 19th, when Romantic theorists talked about a (gendered, male) person as a "fountainhead" of creation... someone unencumbered by history and society... reliant on nobody but themselves, who creates "great" things.

Read More...

Summary only...

Going mad for Mad Men? What's with the feminist love?

For the past few weeks the blogosphere has been buzzing about the premiere of season 3 of AMC's critically acclaimed Mad Men. Feminist after feminist blogger has declared her love for the show and its portrayal of gender roles in 1960s America.

At some points I found myself enjoying the show. The drama was interesting. Some of the characters are incredibly compelling. Everyone can play armchair psychologist while they watch the show. "Pete Campbell has such daddy issue and a huge case of white privilege. " "Peggy is trying so hard to shake the repression she faced growing up, but she can't even fully decide if it was a bad thing." So it has that appeal. Plus, an article in the London Review of Books after the first season really sums up its other sources of appeal perfectly:

Mad Men is an unpleasant little entry in the genre of Now We Know Better. We watch and know better about male chauvinism, homophobia, anti-semitism, workplace harassment, housewives’ depression, nutrition and smoking. We wait for the show’s advertising men or their secretaries and wives to make another gaffe for us to snigger over. ‘Have we ever hired any Jews?’ – ‘Not on my watch.’ ‘Try not to be overwhelmed by all this technology; it looks complicated, but the men who designed it made it simple enough for a woman to use.’ It’s only a short further wait until a pregnant mother inhales a tumbler of whisky and lights up a Chesterfield; or a heart attack victim complains that he can’t understand what happened: ‘All these years I thought it would be the ulcer. Did everything they told me. Drank the cream, ate the butter. And I get hit by a coronary.’ We’re meant to save a little snort, too, for the ad agency’s closeted gay art director as he dismisses psychological research: ‘We’re supposed to believe that people are living one way, and secretly thinking the exact opposite? . . . Ridiculous!’ – a line delivered with a limp-wristed wave. Mad Men is currently said to be the best and ‘smartest’ show on American TV. We’re doomed.

Beneath the Now We Know Better is a whiff of Doesn’t That Look Good. The drinking, the cigarettes, the opportunity to slap your children! The actresses are beautiful, the Brilliantine in the men’s hair catches the light, and everyone and everything is photographed as if in stills for a fashion spread. The show’s ‘1950s’ is a strange period that seems to stretch from the end of World War Two to 1960, the year the action begins. The less you think about the plot the more you are free to luxuriate in the low sofas and Eames chairs, the gunmetal desks and geometric ceiling tiles and shiny IBM typewriters. Not to mention the lush costuming: party dresses, skinny brown ties, angora cardigans, vivid blue suits and ruffled peignoirs, captured in the pure dark hues and wide lighting ranges that Technicolor never committed to film.

Sooner or later, though, unless you watch the whole series with the sound off, you will have to face up to the story.

And the main gist of the story centers around Don Draper. And Don Draper is a real asshole. And that's really what I can't get over when I watch this show. He's a terrible person, and the people around him are worshipping terrible people. That or their victims of the terrible people. And I get so tired of the psuedo-edgy male protagonists in dramas these days...it's nothing new. It's been around at least since Joseph Conrad in the 1890s. The detached male figure, isolated, trying to figure out his identity in a crazy, mixed up, modern world. It's so cliche. And what bothers me even more is that he's portrayed as being so dreamy. He's an asshole, and yet his fellow characters, and even progressives who watch, seem to admire him. You might know he's a sexist, capitalist, narcissistic asshole, but you can't help but gawk at his beauty, his power, his smooth talking.

I think there's a desire to see a lot more subversion in this show than is there. I just can't see the depiction of patriarchy and racism and economic injustice as subversion, if it's never called those things, and the man who stands as their champion is our hero. Yeah, we see a lot of misogyny, and every once in awhile we see a little hope that the women on the show just aren't going to take it any more. But that's not a startling critique of society -- society then or now. It's just a depiction of society in the 1960s.

I think it's part of an artistic cowardice among progressive artists these days that creator Michael Weiner betrays in choosing this approach. They want to show negative social structures, but they don't want to get preachy, because they don't want to alienate people who might still believe in those structures. They'd rather keep their audience big. They want to show self-congratulatory folks how far we've come and how bad things were and make them think they're watching a good piece of criticism, but they don't want to turn off the people who remain misogynists and racists among us, at least not entirely. While some of us are seeing the sexism in the show as exactly that, vintage sexism from a time before the women's movement of the 1960s, others might see it as simply a portrayal of how things once were, and maybe even, be able to watch the show and go on thinking those gender relationships were just fine. Don Draper is sexy. And rich. And he gets everything he wants, even if he is torturing himself a little inside. It's doesn't look all that bad, in the end.

And let's face it, there's something intoxicating about the show and all of its sin, and I don't just mean the incredible amount of alcohol the characters consume. These people are attractive. They have very sexy sex. And the nostalgia of years past, even if we can recognize the social ills of the time, appeals to us at some level, even if it's not the old fashion or the traditional family, but something like the smell of social change in the air. I can understand the desire to try to read more subversion into the show than is actually there. Watching the show has some pleasure in it, so it's not unbelievable we'd want to think we're doing more than we are by watching it.

I just wish we could watch shows like this and acknowledge what it is we like about them, not try to turn them into the works of art for social justice and social commentary that they aren't even trying to be. Showing sexism is not the same thing as fighting sexism or even labeling sexism. And it isn't necessarily progressive in any way (Even Jezebel's feature on "15 Feminist Moments From Mad Men" is really just a list of moments where sexist things happened to women). Let's just face the fact that at the end of the day, watching a drama about Don Draper and the madness of the 1960s is good entertainment. There's little redeeming about him, and as far as I can see, little redeeming about the show and its take on anything, including gender roles.

Read More...

Summary only...

Incorporating Althusser's theory of ideology with contemporary feminism

Inspired by T, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about ISA’s (Ideological State Apparatuses), particularly about how well Althusser’s theory of ideology and its role in the creation of social subjects, which one can reasonably assume was built mostly around explaining economic phenomena, relates to contemporary feminist theory and explanations of the status quo when it comes to gender relations and hierarchy.

Just looking at the feminist blogosphere, it seems very common practice to assume culture, in particular, works like Althusser’s ISA in reaffirming gender inequalities and creating certain kinds of gendered subjects. Look no further than the large number of posts around the blogosphere on sexist advertisements during the Super Bowl. This sort of media or cultural criticism makes up a bulk of mainstream, non-academic feminist analysis (and I think one could quite easily make the argument that even most academic feminism is about culture). This criticism is done almost with the assumption that all readers understand the impact that culture has on promoting sexism (or negative experiences of gender even)—that the portrayals of gender relations and roles in commercials and on tv shows and in movies and in music contribute to the normalizing (or, reifying the status quo) of gendered hegemony.

In this sense, Althusser’s theory of ISAs seems to meld really well with mainstream feminism. But, here’s my question: why is there an inordinate amount of feminist focus on culture as an ISA, at the expense of some of the other ISAs T mentions in his post (education, the legal system, the political system)?*

Here are a few ideas I’ve come up with so far:

1-Talking about culture is easier than talking about popular economics or the education system and pedagogy or any of those other spheres.

Why is it easier? Late capitalism seems to require a certain level of consumer savvy for mere survival. People in general are trained to look at advertisements or really any representational mediums with a certain degree of scrutiny. We’re always asking, what are you trying to sell me and how are you doing it? This doesn’t only apply to actual products but to representations anywhere. We ask it even of the most inane sitcoms. What is the Debra character on Everybody Loves Raymond trying to tell me about being a wife and mother? We don’t need college degrees to feel adept to discuss culture.

2-It’s more fun to talk about culture than to talk about other ISAs. I don’t know that this requires an explanation or that I could even provide one, but on nine out of ten days I’d rather talk about sexism in the Millionaire Matchmaker than in pedagogy in our public education system.

3-It is easier to pinpoint and affect the bad guy behind advertisements than it is to address the “bad guy” behind these other ISAs. When NBC airs a series of sexist ads and runs a series of sexist shows, we know who is to blame and we know how to assign that blame. We write letters, we boycott products. It might not always be effective, but at least we have a line of attack.

Such it is amid liberal-capitalism. We have more control of products than we do of our own government. Maybe we could articulate what is going on with gender in these other ISAs, but even then, what would we do about them? Vote every couple years? I don’t think I’m alone in feeling more than a little powerless in our so-called democracy. Power is distributed throughout the state in such a way that it’s difficult to say where the abuse is originating, let alone to decide how to take it on.

I think the fact that it’s more difficult to attack other ISAs makes it more frustrating and, therefore, less pleasant to focus on.

I’m sure there are other possible explanations for focusing on culture, but, maybe more importantly, what is the effect of the dearth of analysis of other ISAs? Here’s my hypothesis:

1-We become more inclined to accept liberal state-ism, which causes problems like the acceptance of the sorts of unfreedom created by the state, which scholars like Wendy Brown have tried to take on. Instead of focusing on the underlying forces producing culture and reaffirming it as good (these other ISAs), we focus on more surface issues like Pepsi commercials and the waist sizes of the average super model. Those issues can be important to talk about too, but soon we start thinking the problems aren’t with the basic, unjust structure of our global society, but just problems with companies here and there and the way they talk about things. Not only is the state not part of the problem, but maybe it’s even part of the solution to these private instigators. Maybe we can regulate these representational problems to a certain extent? Maybe we can threaten corporations with economics and government? We start to side with the state and see it as our ally. We become pawns of the state, even if we don’t want to be. You know, the same state perpetrating violence all over the world, the same state thriving off of the prison-industrial complex, the same state that affords more rights and freedoms and support to corporations than it does to its people.

2-We attempt to analyze other ISAs with the same formulas we use for analyzing culture as an ISA. Even when we talk about sexism perpetuated by government, or say, the military, or by economists, we have a tendency to talk about representation instead of looking at the ways they institutionalize hegemony. We ask questions like, how many women senators are there? How gender neutral is the language here?

These questions might be important to ask, and they may yield productive answers. But, what aren’t we asking? It may be great that Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State, but why aren’t we talking about how little her policies have done to help young women in Palestine? What if the representation we gain with a woman heading State is actually a curse because it further embeds and normalizes violence we once associated with masculine leadership? The violence might still disproportionately affect women, but now, by praising a minor representational advancement in an institution we might otherwise consider criminal, we’ve signed up for it too. In a way, we’ve laid out our priorities.

3-We fail to realize how intricate the ties between culture and the other ISAs have become, how mutually reliant each ISA is on the other. And I don’t mean this in an abstract sense. I mean, literally, we fail to see that the executives behind NBC are pulling the strings of our legislators. We might not notice that NBC takes the cues of the State Department when it airs certain stories on its nightly news and even adds certain plots to its TV shows. We might see stories about battered Muslim women on Law and Order SVU who were liberated by noble American soldiers, only to be abused again by their families in the U.S., only to be later saved by the noble U.S. justice system. How did these storylines come to be and who stands to benefit when we accept them?

Now, I don’t think it’s that these questions are never asked in the feminist blogosphere or elsewhere, but I think it’s problematic that they seem to be rarely asked relative to the number of questions we ask about culture.

That's all I've got right now. This theory is in its baby stages. Please feel free to rip it to shreds or add to it in any way you can.

*Please feel free to argue this point with me if you don’t think there is an inordinate focus on culture in most feminist circles.

Read More...

Summary only...

Why is the new art so hard to understand?

The above is the title of a marvelous short lecture delivered by Theodor Adorno in 1931 (published in English for the first time in 2001 in Richard Leppert's (ed.) huge collection of all of Adorno's writings on music). Its striking how much is packed into this short piece. It is also very refreshing to read someone as erudite (and also, not accidentally, very challenging to read) as Adorno trying to answer this seemingly straight-forward question before a very wide audience. What's interesting is that Adorno's talk is not ostensibly addressed to philosophers, theorists, academics or artists. Rather, he addresses the general public who is confronted by artworks. Think of the 'average' person wandering through a museum.

The first thing he does is delimit the scope of the talk to a specific sense of the question ('why is the new art so hard to understand?'). After all, what is "the new art' and what does he mean by 'hard to understand?'. Adorno has in mind art that is specifically modern in the "sense that it is accompanied by the shock of its strangeness and enigmatic form, the shock that is actually the basis of all the talk about its being hard to understand."

Whatever we might say about 13th and 14th century European painting, for example, the content and formal characteristics of such works are, more or less, readily intelligible to a modern Western audience. A straight-forward representational painting, or even better a painting trying to achieve perfect mimesis, would hardly strike the average viewer as shocking, strange, enigmatic or confusing.
We wouldn't expect any person on the street to say of a painting by Michelangelo or even Monet, for example, 'that's not art'. In contrast, it would not be difficult to imagine this same 'average' person on the street standing before a Pollock, or a Richter, or Rothko, Stella, etc. in a confused (or, perhaps indignant and resentful) fashion, perhaps even wondering whether there is anything of value about such works (if they are even to be considered 'art' in any meaningful sense at all). I'm reminded of numerous times when I stood before works of this sort in a state of confusion: what is this about? what is going on here?
In other words, "older art", as Adorno points out, "possesses a certain immediacy of effect that makes it understandable, while this immediacy is no longer present in the new art, and hence some kind of helping operations are required in order to penetrate its center."

For Adorno, this experience of difficulty derives from the fact that the production of art, artistic material, the demands and tasks that confront the artists as they work, etc. have all become divorced from consumption. That is, artistic production has been divorced from "the presumptions, claims and possibilities of comprehension that the reader, viewer or listener brings to the works of art." Another way to put this would be to point out that artistic production in modern capitalist society (in contrast to other eras in which artistic production was explicitly embedded in other life-activities), art is removed from all immediate use and thus from all immediate comprehensibility. After all, "art for art's sake" is not a call to make art conform to the demands of daily life activities (e.g. to force works of art, on pain of dismissal as 'useless', to have some immediate purpose such as getting stains out of clothing).

Hostility to 'modern' works of art (be they paintings, music, etc.) takes many forms, but one common reaction I've observed is the impulse to point to the past as an era (before things took a 'wrong turn') which must be recovered. I am reminded here of certain types of conservatory-student musicians, totally hostile to Webern or Berg, who might instead recommend a recovery of tonality or a return to the 'beautiful' music of earlier (Romantic, in particular) periods. Schoenberg's music is 'bad', for example, to the extent that "the chords, which are built in many layers and do not have a given function within a given key, cannot be repeated as arbitrarily as the old ones, or because the rhythms cannot be combined into regular, symmetrical forms".

Another way to characterize this attitude would be to posit the history of Western music as a continuous, internally coherent progression which made sense until the isolated aberration of artists associated with 'modernism'.

Adorno points out, however, that the relevant consideration here is not the psyche of modern artists (as deviant individuals, or as having orchestrated this 'wrong turn' into smug incomprehensibility), but rather the socio-economic situation of contemporary society itself. The difficult, challenging character of modern artworks, for Adorno, is "the result of a socio-economic development that transforms all goods into consumer goods, makes them abstractly exchangeable, and has therefore torn them asunder from the immediacy of use." In modern art's struggle to maintain its own autonomy from the demands of 9:00-5:00, from the banality of mass markets, it has generally endeavored to abjure the dictates of 'use' altogether. In earlier societies, art was bound up with ceremonial and religious functions; this is no longer the case in contemporary culture. Whereas most all consumer products (themselves a strange development: 'products made for the purpose of consumption') retain some inkling of use-value, art is purportedly exceptional precisely to the extent that denounces all considerations of 'use' in this sense.

Why is modern art alienated from use? Adorno rightly points out that to "describe how this alienation came about would be nothing less than to sketch the history of our society". But what is it about contemporary society, then, that accounts for this divestment from use and this struggle to preserve art's particularity? As suggested earlier, For Adorno it has to do with the separation of production from consumption. Production tends to behave in a way that expresses the tensions and contradictions of existing social relations prevailing in a certain society. Production, through being directly subjected to these forces often becomes the site of calls for change. Consumption, in contrast, tends to "lag behind in unchanging existence, because it does not posses the force of production, which would point beyond what is unchanging; socially consumption is merely produced without itself seriously helping to produce -and only mirrors relations whose primary need is to maintain themselves". In other words, the methods/trajectories/goals of producing tend to be a site of change more so than the tendencies of consumption. Consumption is in important respects more conservative and passive (think of someone sitting in front of a TV) whereas production tends to play a more active role in shaping/changing current consuming habits (think of the production of the TV shows in question). The interaction between the two, however, is not a one-way street. Without getting into too much detail here, the relationship is dialectical (they mutually interact with each other and causation does not proceed linearly from production to consumption). Nonetheless, 'dialectical relationship' does not mean that production and consumption are equally efficacious with respect to the other. Moreover, we must not only consider the dialectical interplay between production and consumption, but also the internal dialectic between different modes of production throughout history (i.e. the ways in which certain productive activities are influenced by/reactions to/caused by earlier productive activities).

I've taken this discussion astray a bit, so let me try to bring it back to Adorno's point about the separation of consumption and production and its consequences for art. In impressionist art, or the music of Wagner, for example, the "lines between consumption and production had not yet been cut... but were merely wired in a more complicated way... in Wagner the preexisting schema of a harmony, which always grows out of a tension and resolution, did not emerge from the work itself but was still carried by social tradition." The shock that accompanied cubism and futurism, in contrast, was qualitatively different from the "agitation over Wagner's supposedly wrong notes, or the supposed daubings of the Impressionists". The radical break between consumption and production as it regards modern art of the early 20th century, for example, was such that art no longer "had the task of representing a reality that is preexisting for everyone in common, but rather of revealing, in its isolation, the very cracks that reality would like to cover over in order to exist in safety; and that, in so doing, it repels reality". [my emphasis]

But must art be divorced from use? Why can't art continue to be embedded in the life-activities of contemporary society and take a form that is both useful and immediately comprehensible? The answer is that it can and in many cases it does; but what are the political stakes in doing so? The "really useful art, which serves the purpose of distraction -entertainment reading and kitsch prints, blockbuster films and hit dance tunes - is historically innocent and, despite all apparent timeliness of content, formally on a technical level this material is long out of date." Thus, even as certain cultural artifacts have an immediacy that seems to suggest how timely they are, they are 'historically innocent' in that they recycle old forms and endlessly re-issue slightly modified and repackaged forms as new and exciting. This repetition, banality, etc. is a feature of our current social/economic order. So,also, is this 'historical innocence' (a mode of repression, of forgetting) in which knowledge of the processes (read: political and economic struggles) by which 'we arrived at the present situation' is omitted.

Thus, rather than opting for complicity and unreflective (i.e. conservative) affirmation of the current state of society, progressive and avant-garde artistic movements of the 20th century have sought to resist the current order. Its another issue entirely how successful their strategies have been. But perhaps we could relate this question to the issue of the 'difficulty of the new art'. Consider the following objection. If art is so difficult, obscure, inaccessible, challenging and so on, that it is in many ways "secluded, off by itself", how could it play a politically progressive role if so few people can be affected by it? Adorno is worried about this problem and he notes that the "separation of art from reality endangers art itself... [this seclusion] threatens to become ideological -to be self-satisfied in a muffled, petit-bourgeois way, to forget its supportive human function, ultimately to become petrified into bad guildmanship." The danger here, in part, is that contemporary art could become all of the things that its philistine detractors love to say about it. But clearly this danger cannot be remedied by "arbitrary adaptation to the state of social consciousness... by reversion to older, outlived and outmoded way of proceeding" for in so doing art would sacrifice consciousness of itself, a sacrifice no critical art can afford to make. Moreover, we should not assume that the political solution to this problem can be solved by art alone, for it cannot. The economic/social conditions would themselves have to be changed as well; thus it is hardly a progressive position to simply chastise art for failing to 'reach out to all people as they are'. For the material, economic and political conditions would have to be different for such a widespread 'reaching out' to be a progressive move at all: it would require that the stark work/life (work versus leisure) divide of modern capitalism be abolished, that people "independent of privilege, be able to spend their leisure time occupied substantively and extensively with artistic matters." For things to be different, there would have to be an abolishment of the "demonically precise mechanism of advertising and anesthetization that -in every moment of people's leisure time- prevents them from occupying themselves with actual art".

Art alone cannot secure such a change in material conditions, but this is not to say that such conditions cannot be changed by any means. Recognizing the role that the social/economic structure of society plays in circumscribing the efficacy of art as political resistance requires also recognizing that many consumption-related 'needs' and desires are themselves the congealed effects of social/economic order on people's consciousness.

For Adorno, the argument that "the public wants kitsch" is dishonest. The need for "bad, illusory, deceptive things is generated by the all-powerful propaganda apparatus", to put the point in slightly overstated terms. In addition, the need for relaxation (instead of seeking out, during leisure time, cognitively challenging/demanding activities) is justifiable, but only because so many people are forced into "circumstances that absorb their strength and time in such a fashion that they are no longer capable of other things."

He ends the lecture with an imperative: "Let no one come back with a rejoinder about the slothful nature of human beings. For the suspicion is not so easily allayed that the consciousness of the person who responds in this way is more slothful than those on whose behalf he is responding."

Read More...

Summary only...

Che

I tend to hate biopics (except this one maybe). But maybe as a minimum, more people will know who the hell it is they are wearing on their t-shirts.

Read More...

Summary only...

Slumdog Millionaire: Mixing raw reality and fantastic fiction

Today I had the chance to a see a new movie in an actual movie theater, the first one in a long time. My indie loving family and I deliberated between Milk and Slumdog Millionaire, before finally deciding Milk might be too tortured to watch on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Well, that might be true, but the first 30 seconds of Slumdog Millionaire let us know we'd made a mistake if we'd been hoping for something light and nice.

While I'd heard a lot of hype about the movie, I hadn't heard any detail about the plot other than it centered around a poor Indian man trying to win a million dollars on the Hindi equivalent of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. Jamal, our "slumdog," tells us the story of his life, with all its violence and disappointment, as he grew up in the slums of post-colonial Mumbai.

The soundtrack is wonderful, the acting superb, the romance lovely and endearing. The poverty is raw and (for the most part) inescapable, the injustices of modern India obvious. But I think it's the general premise of the movie, the skeletons of the plot, that left me with a feeling of dissatisfaction. For 100 minutes or more, this movie illustrates in a most heartbreaking and gritty way, the slums. The poverty, the violence, the broken system of India feels so raw, and then suddenly the wordly angst of the first-world viewer is distracted, when something completely fantastic happens: (SPOILER ALERT) Jamal wins the million dollars, and the girl, mostly because he got lucky, because as Jamal himself says, his destiny was simply written this way. After the money and the girl are safe in his arms, the end credits literally roll amid scenes from a Bollywood-inspired finale, complete with Jamal, his lady, and a train station full of celebrating slumdogs dancing and singing.

The fact that Jamal's success, after all his pain and loss, is one in a billion (one in a billion in India alone, let's not even try to consider the entire globe here), is a moot point. So where does the movie leave us? We feel really good for Jamal. He's beaten the odds. He has found happiness even though the world around him is chaos. But what about the world? They're left singing and dancing like in some of the most feel-good fictions we can create for ourselves. The directors (Trainspotting's Danny Boyle and Monsoon Wedding's Loveleen Tandan) make no apologies for this resignation to unreality to tie up the all too real loose ends of the movie. Are we really supposed to buy it? Can't art do any better than that? Is it a matter of deciding on a ridiculously unrealistic conclusion that makes us happy or a realistic, depressing, frustrating ending? Is there no in-between? I'm honestly not sure right now. It may be that question that has left me so restless and not the movie itself.

Trailer, if you're interested:

Read More...

Summary only...

Not exactly dead white guy stuff, but another artsy interruption nonetheless

As a product of the American West, and a confessed biophiliac, I have something of a soft spot for naturalist artists from the West and Southwest. While many people are probably passingly familiar with the brilliant Edward Abbey, and I too love his writings, no naturalist seems to speak to me and my experiences in the West more than Terry Tempest Williams, a Utahn, a naturalist, and a gifted poet and essayist.

Williams was on my local NPR affiliate's morning talk show Radio West this week, talking about her new book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World. Even listening to her on the radio was lovely enough to almost lull me to a pleasant sleep at my cubicle (and I don't just mean when she was giving readings directly from the book), so I went to the nearest bookstore afterward to see if I couldn't pick up a copy for myself. Well, lame ass Borders that it is, did not yet have the book. So instead, I walked away with Williams' most highly acclaimed book to date, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.

Here's the back-of-the-book blurb:

In the spring of 1983, Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. Tht same spring, Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and with it the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had to come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s. As it interweaves these narratives of dying and accommodation, Refuge transforms tragedy into a document of renewal and spiritual grace, resulting in a work that seems certain to become a classic in the literatures of women, nature, and grieving.

Yeah, I know, how can we possibly resist? The product between the covers doesn't disappoint. It's just beautiful and painful and then beautiful again.

The light begins to deepen. It is sunset. I open the shutters, so Mother can see the clouds. I return to her bedside. She takes my hand and whispers, "Will you give me a blessing?"

In Mormon religion, formal blessings of healing are given by men through the Priesthood of God. Women have no outward authority. But within the secrecy of sisterhood we have always bestowed benisons upon our families.

Mother sits up. I lay my hands upon her head and in the privacy of women, we pray.

***

It's the Fourth of July, and the family decides to celebrate in the Tetons. Mother says she is sick of lying in bed and needs a change of scenery. I wonder how far she can push herself.

Brooke and I, with Mother and Dad, hike to Taggart Lake.

The Taggart-Bradley fire of last fall has opened up the country. It is a garden of wildflowers with fireweed, spirea, harebell, lupine, and heart-leaf arnica shimmering against the charred bark of lodgepole pines.

I have never been aware of the creek's path until now. It feels good to be someplace lush. The salt desert is too stark for me now because my interior is bare.

We reach the lake, only a mile and a half away, but each step for Mother is a triumph of will. She rests on her favorite boulder, a piece of granite I have known since childhood. She leans into the shade of the woods and closes her eyes.

"This feels so good," she says as the wind circles her. "It feels so good to be cool. I feel like I'm burning up inside."

A western tanager, red, yellow, and black, flies to the low branch of a lodgepole.

"Look, Mother! A tanager!" I hand her my binoculars.

"You look for me..." she says.

***

I am retreating into the Wasatch Mountains. I cannot travel west to Great Salt Lake. It is too exposed, too wicked, and too hot with one-hundred degree temperatures. The granite of Big Cottonwood Canyon invigorates me as I hike from Brighton to Lake Catherine. Glacier lilies blanket the meadows. Usually they are gone by now. I pick one and press it between the pages of my journal.

"For mother--" I say to myself, rationalizing my act, when I know it is for me.

Hiking the narrow trial up the steep slope massages my lungs. I breathe deeply. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

I climb up the last pass and break down into the cirque. My lungs and legs feel strong. I hve the lake to myself. My ears begin to throb with the altitude. My eyes water in the wind. I take off my rucksack, pull out my windbreaker and lunch. I can see the rock I am going to sit on. I hike down a little further and settle in.

Peeling an orange is a good thing to do in the mountains. It slows down. You bite into the tart rind, pull it back with your teeth and then let your fingers undress the citrus. Nothing else exists beyond or before this task. The naked fruit is in your hands waiitng for sections to be separated. Halves. Quarters. And then the delicacy of breaking the orange down to its smallest smile.

I lay out these ten sections on the flat granite rock I am sitting on. The sun threatens to dry them. But I wait for the birds. Within minutes, Clark's nutcrackers and gray jays join me. I suck on oranges as the mountains begin to work on me.

This is why I always return. This is why I can always go home.

It's all I can do to make myself stop excerpting at some point, and not just go straight on to transcribe the entire thing for you to read. If you want more TTW, check out one of my favorite of her essays, which you can read for free here at her site.

There are a few things I can name about what I love about (and so maybe this is a justifiable "interruption" in a way) this kind of writing: 1-The high standard of justice naturalists hold themselves and our world to. 2-The recognition that community and relationships--not just with other humans but with the world and with non-human creatures--are important to achieving that justice and peace. And 3-The escapism from capitalist relationships, the ability of naturalists to connect people and animals and nature to one another independent of capital and profit. Sure, they eventually have to climb down from the mountain and go back to the exploitation, but I still think this sort of escapism can play an important role even by envisioning for us another way of living and coexisting.

Read More...

Summary only...