How Did Al Gore Get The Nation to Care About Green?

Copyright 2007 Original Research Document by HurricaneCandice
Abstract: A feminist investigation of the politics of the green movement

How Did Al Gore Get the Nation to Care About Green?

For decades women have lead the way in ecological stuggles. Women have lived in trees, have chained themselves, started organizations, websites and foundations, arguably held up the foundation of the movement. Now one movie comes out that has completely changed the face of the movement, and suddenly people are listening. Why has Al Gore jumpstarted a revolution that should have been started decades ago? Women such as Rachel Carson and Velma Glover have been heeding warning of the dangers of climate change and global warming for years, but suddenly a male voice is worth listening to? How did this happen? Why are their voices so much more worthy? Where does this leave women in the struggle against the clock?
Documented as far back as you want to look, women have been holding down the fort in terms of environmental causes. Women have suffered, struggled and risked their lives in the name of environmental protection. For example, “In 1938, cherry trees needed to be cleared to build the Jefferson Memorial, but a group of women chained themselves to the trees to prevent workers from cutting them down. The women removed the chains only after a promise was given to plant more trees,” (Beal), or the headline of the New York Times on April 23rd 1958: “Miss Carol Hannig, who organized the Rooftop Gardeners, exercises her green thumb on roof of 875 Park Ave New York, NY.” There’s Julia “Butterfly” Hill who lived in a 600 year old redwood for two years in order to keep it from being cut down, (Knapp) and Diane Wilson who was “fasting in solidarity with three Dominican nuns who had been arrested and incarcerated for protesting a nuclear munitions dump site in Colorado,”(Eugenia) and a young girl who goes by Sarah who chained herself to a logging truck to stop clear cutting on Vancouver Island (Dwivedi).
Not only have women put their lives at stake, but they’ve also worked tirelessly in organizations, non-profits, political arenas and laboratories. In 1951 Rachel Carson was the first scientist who “sounded the alarm about environmental dangers. As a scientist Miss Carson knew the value of careful, detached research, but it was her unique, empathetic presentation of the workings of nature in Under the Sea-Wind [and] The Sea Around Us…that gave impetus to the growing environmental awareness in this country and around the world,” (EPA). Inspired by Carson, “Diplomat Inga Thorsson of Sweden suggested to the United Nations in 1968 that a conference be held to consider problems of the environment at the intergovernmental level,”(EPA). In 2006 the United Nations Environment Program announced the most influential women in environmental politics: “Names include UK primatologist Jane Goodall, Inuit leader Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Julia Carabias-Lillo of Mexico, Princess Basma Bint Ali of Jordan, Mei Ng of China, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai of Kenya.” But politics are not the only way to fight. Chelsea Green opened a publishing company for sustainability literature only. There are hundreds of online women run organizations working for the cause: The Women’s Environmental Network, Women’s Environment and Development Network and the Committee on Women, Population and the Environment, just to name a few.
Clearly women are heavily involved in environmental work and have been for a long time. Where were the men, while the women were chaining themselves to bulldozers? Why in the office, of course, contemplating profit margins, free trade agreements and outsourcing; effectively undermining everything their wives and sisters were working for.
Suddenly, after a hundred years of female voices speaking out against environmental injustice, global warming and pollution, Al Gore comes along with blockbuster documentary called An Inconvenient Truth. As Vice President to Clinton, Gore worked on a carbon tax and brought scientists in to speak at a congressional hearing on the topic. He says,
“As a college student I had a professor who was the first scientist to measure CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere, and I felt as if I had a ringside seat on the beginning of a great scientific adventure. I kept in touch with that professor and seven years after I graduated from college I was elected to the US Congress and I helped organize the first hearings on global warming and invited my professor to be a lead off-witness. But I was surprised when my colleagues in Congress did not have the reaction I hoped they would have to those hearings. I thought they would react the way I did to this class that I took, and that didn’t happen,”(Beirne).
This is what inspired him to write the book and make the movie. After it opened at Sundance Film Festival in 2006, a firestorm of media frenzy followed suit. Seemingly over night, the headlines of magazines were dawning the movie’s tag line “The scariest movie you will ever see!” Suddenly, America was listening. There was a flood of old research resurfacing, new research being funded and conducted and everyone was paying attention. What got their attention? Was it Al Gore, the ex-Vice President? Was it Al Gore the politician? Or Al Gore the author of the 1992 book Earth in the Balance? How about Al Gore the man? What if Hillary Clinton had made the same movie? Would the media have been so willing to cover it? Would she have been called the “protector of the planet?” Or perhaps something more like, “hippy, tree-hugger, nut job?”
What was it that made Al Gore so credible? Perhaps it is that he had already built a name and reputation. Maybe the recent tragedies of New Orleans and Sri Lanka had everyone anxious already. Maybe the timing was perfect. Maybe Al Gore offered a leader with realistic explanations for the strange and powerful weather patterns we had witnessed.
Thomas Friedman suggests in the New York Times Magazine cover story “The Power of Green” that it’s about time the green movement got a male physique:
“One thing that always struck me about the term “green” was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by its opponents — by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as “liberal,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” “girlie-man,” “unpatriotic,” “vaguely French. Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic.” (Friedman 1).
There it is. Al Gore gave a male persona to a feminized topic. Which brings up the question of how it became feminized in the first place and why that makes it invalid?
One of the first to voice the idea of woman as other, aside from Simone De Beauvoir in The Second Sex, was Luce Irigaray, author of The Sex Which is Not One, where Luce illustrates how woman has become the second sex: women are defined by what they are not (men.) This binary sets women up psychologically and socially to never be more than a compliment to men, a side note. This binary positions women not next to men, but under and therefore dominated. Ecofeminists have long used Irigaray’s work as a foundation for earth as woman. Such as Ariel Salleh, who explains “the woman equals nature dichotomy”:
“In Ecofeminism as Politics, I create this Man/Woman=Nature equation to parody the reductive, dualist and positivist mindset that prevails in the West. It summarizes how the dominant eurocentric culture has for centuries seen masculine identity as belonging to the sphere of culture and the feminine as identical with ‘nature’. So men have established institutions, which secure their status over and above ‘natives’, women, children, animals, and the rest of ‘nature’. Knowledges too, from religion to science, are contaminated by this polarized ‘body logic’ and used to conserve masculine superordination. One side of the M/W=N formula is accorded value as a properly human presence (1) and the other is merely objectified as a labor and sexual resource (0). The ongoing difficulties women face, even in our universities, are due to this deep structural attitude which so many individual men unconsciously bear,” (Salleh 1).

Here Salleh explores the essentialist view of the female relationship to nature. It is easy to see how we’ve reached the present. If women are seen as property, as necessary for child bearing only, as an extension of earth, which is here to be used up and consumed, then there is no reason to assume that women’s opinion of the earth or her expressed concern over the earth should be any more relevant than the cries of a cow on it’s way to slaughter. After all, for a woman to speak for the earth is merely for her to speak for herself, which we have seen is irrelevant. It is a given that woman, just like nature, is here to be consumed; to be used up without regard.
Eco feminism has discovered what the rest of the feminist movements have had to discover: All domination is interconnected. Chris Cuomo articulates this phenomenon: “In more precise terms, ecofeminism stresses the depth to which human realities are embedded in ecological realities, and the fact that we are all composed of physical and conceptual connections and relationships,” (Cuomo 1). She says that even for feminist women, it can be hard to envision where the forms of oppression intersect. It can be hard to see how the environment plays a role in our daily lives, because we (in the first world) have moved so far away from it. We may be “natural beings” but we are anything but a part of nature. Instead we dominate it, manipulate it, steal from it and mutilate it. Male dominance over nature, over commerce and capitalism have paved the way (literally and figuratively) for a world in which a woman’s voice on matters of nature or conservation are useless. Rachel Carson may have stood before the Environmental Protection Agency fifty years ago and explained how delicate the balance of the ocean and air are, how we cannot dump poison into the Chesapeake Bay without serious recourse, but it fell on deaf ears; not because they did not care, but because the ocean was not a part of the “big picture.” For the EPA to go to congress and say, we must stop clear cutting, stop oil spills and stop illegal dumping, meant unhappy industry. Unhappy industry meant weak economics. What was and is a part of the “big picture” is a booming consumerist economy. As Friedman said, “it’s about time the green movement got a male physique,” not because men couldn’t understand the seriousness of global warming and environmental degradation, but because the only language that they’ve been taught is one of power and economics. When the flashing sign read “There will be no Wall Street, no SUV, no corn flakes when the glaciers melt,” finally it was clear.
This is where it gets messy. The whole world can watch a documentary on the ice caps melting and think “Wow, that’s sad. Where will the polar bears live?” But as long as the number one concern is big money, big business, globalization and imperialistic endeavor, the earth will continue to suffer and so will we. Here is where the second part of Friedman’s “masculinization of green” comes in. The green movement must become a shift in economic philosophy. It must become a shift in consciousness in the market place. The shift must go from the cheapest, the easiest and the most profitable to the best quality, best made, sustainable and practical. Not only that, but there must be a transition from, the cheapest and easiest, to the closest and most efficient.
Al Gore may have taken the rug out from under the female driven green movement, but he also (perhaps unknowingly) built a platform for them to stand on. By “butching up” the face of the green movement, it stopped being a female endeavor, an emotional, special cause, and became a “serious” issue (a monetary one). But while Gore may have done a service to the earth, he has done a greater disservice to an already marginalized and trivialized woman. Mary Mellor, author of “Women, nature and the social construction of ‘economic man’” investigates this gender disparity: “Economic, rational and scientific man are all manifestations of the dualisms that are central to western society and culture. These dualisms are not merely dichotomous; the economic as against the uneconomic, the rational against the irrational, the scientist as against the untutored layperson, they are also judgmental, with the second half of the pair seen as inferior,” (Mellor 129). While Gore may have brought attention to a much needed cause, sparked research and conversation that Jane Goodall only dreamed of, he also shrugged off a hundred years of serious work on the part of the countless women who devoted their lives to the cause. His documentary did not take the audience through a step-by-step of each victory, each warning sign, and each protest that was founded and fronted by a woman. He did not mention the millions of hours of work and energy that had lead to him standing on screen, speaking facts that women have been shouting for years. He did not choose female scientists, or Inga Thorsson, who lobbied the UN in 1968 to guest speak or quote in his film. There were few if any women seen in the film at all. Al Gore reinforced what men already “knew,” that men had the science, the math, the data that they needed to fully understand the problem. Just as the scientists with the data were men, the men who took the data and started applying the issues to economics were men. Part of this problem is a basic lack of female participation and education in the math and science fields, but more than that, it is a basic duality that women know about the caring and men know about the practice. The news anchors were not interviewing Jane Goodall, Rachel Carson or Wangari Maathai on the authenticity of An Inconvenient Truth, about Global Warming or on real tried and true solutions. No, they were talking to David Rosenberg from Merrill Lynch and NASA climatologist James Hansen. Of course these people have a right to speak, they are knowledgeable and practiced, but they are not working in a movement that has been around since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
So where does this leave women today, on the eve of a total literal meltdown? Are they still fighting the fight? Will they still be participants in the new male arena? The answer that makes the most sense is, of course women will still lead and support the fight, because they’ve always known how and what to do. They’ve always been on the front lines, even when they were mocked. Women have already thought out the solutions to the problem (that being a return to the natural and a return to the practical.) Yes, big change needs to happen on a global scale. It needs to happen in government, economics, industry and policy, but the almost seven billion people on the planet need to do their share too, and women have been teaching that since the beginning of recorded history. Growing food in your yard, walking, making gifts and reusing bottles and cans.
In the fall of 2007, I went to a sustainability training. The audience/participants were predominantly female, women taught many of the classes and spoke on the important issues like clean water, lead paint, gentrification and urban sprawl. Some women had children, and expressed concern for them: they wanted them to have a world to live in and means to do so. Some were older women, who had been in the fight since their youth, but most were mid-twenties, feminist minded, activists. What was their investment? What every woman’s investment is: A general concern for a return to the natural. Maybe it is because “the feminine as identical with ‘nature’” as Ariel Salleh suggests, or maybe it is because women are either bred to be or just generally are social creatures. We network with the people around us, we observe how their world affects them, we notice when environmental factors are doing harm to those we love. Or perhaps it is that the world is smaller than it has ever been. TV, Internet, newspapers and blogs document serious issues all over the world and it has become increasingly difficult to deny them. It has also become increasingly difficult to ignore the interconnectedness of issues. When the news exclaims that the United States bought up every ounce of wood in South America and now the people are starving, it is hard not to acknowledge that we are connected to that. Colleen Mack-Canty writes in “Third-Wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the Nature/Culture Duality:” “These young women also can be characterized as a self-consciously diverse group. They expand the notion of the intersectionality of sexism with race, class, and heterosexuality to include a wider, potentially unending assortment of embodied positions, attitudes, and locations, as they articulate their theoretical and experiential commonalities and differences (Mack-Canty 160). Her thoughts were on the new faces of America, ones that do not fit into any one mold, but her point is that now, more than ever, people must face the very complex, multi faceted picture of the world in which we live. What we need to keep in mind and integrate into the environmental cause, is this sense of interconnection. Few of us only hold ties to one race, nationality, ideology or culture. We are a mixed bag, particularly in America, and we must use that to our advantage in constructing our methods and theory for a green America. Not only that but women must not be afraid to use their skills, their knowledge, what society has nourished in them, but also what it hasn’t. We need women in science, in economics and business, in math, in media, and in government. We need women to occupy half of every office, every board, every business, every corporation, and every newsroom in order to transcend the dualistic, man/woman-nature sentiment. We need just as many women as men running the show and calling the shots. This is not a new idea. Since the beginning of the suffragist movement women have suggested that an equal representation in political, economic and scientific arenas would change the way society functioned. In the green movement, where women have always done the work, they are still not running the show. The top officials in Greenpeace (John Passancantando), WWF (Carter S Parker), US Fish and Wildlife Service (Dale Hall) and United Nations Environmental Programme (Achim Steiner) are all men. Women do the dirty work, while men make the big decisions. “What is needed,” says Mary Mellor, “is to ‘break the boundaries’ of male-dominated economic structures and the anthropocentric and androcentric divisions they represent,” (Mellor 130). From now, until the end of the earth and human race as we know it, women must continue to find ways to influence decision, get into positions of decision making and gain respect, not only as women, not only as environmental activists, but as both.

Works Cited

EPA Women’s History in Environment http://www.epa.gov/history/topics/perspect/women.htm

Berger, Meyer “Miss Carol Hannig, who organized the Rooftop Gardeners, exercises her green thumb on roof of 875 Park Ave New York, NY” New York Times April 23, 1958; ProQuest Historical Newspapers The New York Times (1851 – 2004)

Beal, Debra.Cherry Trees Donated: 1912: A Weekly History Series. http://media.www.bgnews.com/media/storage/paper883/news/2003/03/26/LocalN ews/Cherry.Trees.Donated.1912-1289003.shtml

Knapp, Don. “After 2 Years Tree Sitting Woman Descends, Claiming Victory.” Dec. 18 1999, CNN.com: http://archives.cnn.com/1999/NATURE/12/18/tree.sitter.02/

Cuomo, Chris “On Ecofeminist Philosophy” Ethics & the Environment 7.2 (2002)p .1-11

Friedman, Thomas L. “The Power of Green” New York Times Magazine April 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15green.t.html?ex=1334289600& en=77253fdf8f321a95&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Eugenia Guerra, Maria.: “Meet environmentalist Diane Wilson, A Prophet Without Honor in Her Own Land” Loredo News 2002 http://www.laredosnews.com/archives/june2003/enviroment.htm

Macgregor, Sherilyn “From Care to Citizenship: Calling Ecofeminism Back to Politics” Ethics & Environment 9.1 pp.56-84 Indiana University Press 2004

Mack-Canty, Colleen “Third Wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the Nature/Culture Duality” NWSA Journal 16.3 pp.154-179 2004

Mellor, Mary. “Women, nature and the social construction of ‘economic man’” Ecological Economics 20 University of Newcastle Press1997 p 129-140

Miller, Stuart, E. “Women’s work.” The Environmental Magazine, Jan/Feb97,
Vol. 8, Issue 1

Salleh, Ariel interview: http://www.arielsalleh.net/tet.htm

UNEP: United Nations Environmental Programme:
http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=471&Ar ticleID=5212&l=en

Beirne, Mark. “Al Gore Interview: An Inconvenient Truth.” December 16, 2005. http://www.yourmovies.com.au/news/?action=news&i=91862

Works Referenced

IMDB http://www.IMDB.com

Chelsea Green Publishing: http://www.chelseagreen.com

Committee on Women, Population and the Environment: http://www.cwpe.org

Dwivedi, O.P. Sustainable Development in Canada Broadview Press 2001

Green Belt Movement Kenya Nobel Peace Prize http://gbmna.org/w.php?id=13

Irigaray,Luce The Sex Which is Not One Trans. by Catherine Porter. Cornell University Press 1985

Somma, Mark and Sue Tolleson-Rinehart. “Tracking the Elusive Green Women: Sex, Environmentalism, and Feminism in the United States and Europe” Political Research Quarterly. Vol. 50, No. 1, March 1997, pp. 153-169

Salleh, Ariel. Ecofeminism As Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern Zed
Books 1997

Women’s Environmental Network: http://www.wen.org.uk/

Women’s Environment and Development Network: http://www.wedo.org

Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps

Dear Naomi Wolf, will you marry me??

Recently, feminist theorist and critic Naomi Wolf (author of such works as “The Beauty Myth” and “Fire with Fire” )submitted an article called “Fascist America, in 10 easy steps” to The Guardian. Now, most of us liberal lefts have made one or two of these implications before, but here they are all in one place.
The list may sound all too familiar and should inspire no less than a lot of fear when read.





I’ve got a ring ready and waiting Naomi. We can skip off to Vermont or Massachusetts or..oh yes, a whole list of states other than New York…but then, Spitzer is working on that, and live happily ever after blogging about our discontent.

Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge

Terry’s story is a heartwrenching one. Refuge is the story of a mother and daughter, both exposed to nuclear fallout after testing in the desert near their home, juxtaposed with the story of Terry’s job as a naturalist who studies birds at a nearby refuge. She brilliantly intertwines the two, using the struggle of mother nature to describe her mother’s struggle with cancer.

What I am noticing and taking note of is her not-so-subtle frustration, or “rage” as she calls it, at people’s interference with nature and with her own life. It was people’s interference with water flow (building dams and diverting rivers) that caused the flooding at the refuge, just like it was the government testing that caused her mother’s illness.
At first she is subtle (but she is also young at the time). She is on a birding tour with her greandmother and the guide explains that the government created the marsh and refuge in 1928.

“Funny,” she says, “I thought the marsh had been created in the spirit world first and on earth second.”

Later on the same tour, the guide tells them that the ibises were probing for insects and worms.

“Good eyes,” she replies, “I could only see their decurved bills like scythes disappearing behind the grasses.”

What I like about these passages is the way she so quietly points out how arrogant humans can be. The government assumes that they should and can have control over the natural course of water flow, they assume they know what the birds are eating, they assume they created the sanctuary.
Great read so far. Williams has a wonderful ability to slow down time, really digging deep into herself and her story.

American Icon Dies at 84

Kurt Vonnegut, American satirist, author died at age 84.
This is a sad day for me and many of my peers who were moved to activism, writing or at the very least deep inspiration based on the work and life of this prolific author with such classics as “Cat’s Cradle” and “Slaughterhouse Five.”
I offer a moment of silence.

My love affair with Vonnegut came late in the game. I think I started with “Slaughterhouse Five” as required reading in a Freshmen college class. I thought he was hysterically funny and it was the first time I started to consider the writer’s intention (looking back seems silly). Then I moved on to “Galapagos” to satisfy both my budding curiousity about him and also about those mysterious Volcano-borne islands. After that I went to “Bamboo Snuff Box.” Most recently I picked up “A Man Without a Country,” from a small book store across from a gas station in a town without a name in Southern Vermont. The book sounded like him, but somehow softer, introspective and I recall smiling when I found the book on a dusty shelf in the back room, knowing he would appreciate the much ado.
He was like a smart older brother to me. I sincerely thought that one day, we would meet and I would slap down his book and make some clever comment like, “It’s about time you wrote me into one of your books.” That day will never come now, at least not as I imagined it, but I will continue to read his hateable characters and shifty plot lines. Thanks for the good times Kurt.

Ondaatje’s Running in the Family- Take 2

Micheal Ondaatje’s memoir could just as easily be called a poem injected with prose narrative. His words are so maticulously selected that it’s hard to remember that you aren’t really there. I am in love with his tone and style.
What is most remarkable to me about Ondaatje’s work is his ability to tell you about a character without ever telling you anything. Instead he tells these tall tales which successfully reveal everything you need to know about them.

” My father who was overseeing the cooling of the champagne was nowhere in sight.”

and

“Darling I’ve just come from church and I’ve stolen some flowers for you” (his grandmother speaking)

Another observation is that this is considered a memoir or autobiography, but the first half of the book barely makes mention of him at all. In place of writing himself into the story, he tells you about his family, his culture, the dynamic he’s grown up in and with by telling you everything that happened before he ever came into the picture.

Last, I get this feeling that Ondaatje is frustrated with his family in some way. There are several passages where he comments on his inability to get ONE COHESIVE story:

“I want to sit down with someone and talk with utter directness.”

What I can’t decide is whether his frustration is solely connected to storytelling and getting or whether it’s the whole image. Is he frustrated with their wild tales? Or is he frustrated with the drunken stupidity, the reckless disregard for life?
My feeling is that it may be a bit of both as well as a commentary on the difference in cultural attitudes about alcohol, life, death and family.

Dear Michael,
You rock my world.
Thanks
Candice

Running in the Family by Micheal Ondaatje

I’m loving this book so far! I keep thinking of the Ondaatje quote: “A well told lie is worth a thousand truths.” In some ways that sums up this book and even explains a lot about Karr’s The Liars Club. There are some essences (of stories) you just can’t get with what actually happened. In my own writing, I find sometimes that the drafts write themselves. I am merely a passive observer in my experience with the story until it’s all written. Then I read it and find that somehow my brain wrote it better than my intentions could have. My brain somehow chooses the right examples, words, images, symbols and senses to describe the essence of the scene but re-reading it I know it only sort of happened like that. It’s a tough concept to grapple with, especially if you are writing something like a memoir or autobiography. You feel so invested in the truth that it feels like lying when you add or modify something, even something insignificant.
The reason I am talking about this now (as opposed to during The Liars Club) is because Ondaatje’s book feels like one big well told lie to me:

“I remember the wedding…Halfway between Colombo and Kegalle we recognised a car in the ditch and beside it was the bishop of Colombo who everyone knew was a terrible driver. He was supposed to marry them so we had to give him a lift…[the car was full] and noone could really sit on the bishop’s lap, we let him drive the Fiat.”

What is refreshing and fun about it is the way he wraps just enough facts into the story that you have to at least humor him, if not believe him. It’s like listening to your grandfather’s stories. You know they only sort of happened like that, but you listen anyhow out of interest and out of respect.

The other comment I have about Running in the Family so far is the tone. There is something very mystical, magical: “I saw the mosquito nets stranded in the air like dresses of hanged brides, the skeletons of beds without their matresses, and retreated from the room without ever turning my back to it.” This is his families house, filled with history, tragedy and memories. His words are so heavy at times that it takes the reader’s breath away.
I’ve never encountered a writer with the weight that Ondaajte has. It’s got me hooked.

The Liars Club by Mary Karr- Take 2

There is a moment in the opening of the second half, where I am suddenly aware of the fact taht Karr is telling me a story. So often I forgot that during the first half, mostly because I didn’t find anything she said that unrealisitic.
They’ve just moved to Colorado and the family awakens to a bear rummaging through the trash. Her father “barks” at the bear trying to scare it off and in doing so only agitates it. I had this image of the father and the bear facing off in the yard and it seemed as far fetched as the story of her father and uncle cutting the house in half. It interests me where she juxtaposes her own story telling with her father’s.
Later she even says “I think Daddy would be proud of my telling” commenting on her own story telling ability.
And then within the last few pages:”Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truths direction, even those who believe that sucha a journey might axiomatically set them free,” which is exactly what I think she does. Anyone who writes knows how sometimes the story writes itself. Little details that aren’t folded into your memory somehow end up on the page. Sometimes stories come out in a way that fixes the problem in your head, even though you arent entirely devoted to the “truth.” I think Karr does a fantastic job of acknowledging that all of these things are her truth. This version of her history is the best way she knew how to convey her story and the best way to execute her own catharsis. I love how she ends the book with reflections on her own story telling.
Karr is bright, honest and refreshing to read. My pleasure.

The Liars Club by Mary Karr

I am half way through my second read of The Liars Club by Mary Karr. What a fantastic story teller!
Some things that caught my attention so far: I really enjoy the juxtaposition of herself and her father as storytellers, orators and memory keepers. She is telling the story of her father telling a story in the scene where she is shucking peanuts on the bar at the Legion. i like the way she draws attention to the fact that both of their experiences are relative.
I also kept track of how often and when she mentioned poisons and plagues. I could be grasping at straws here, but there seems to be a correlation with the locusts and her grandmother. She says they run into the locusts on the way to grandma’s house and then when grandma comes to live with them, she creates the same chaos and destruction that the locusts did to the fields.
And then there is the DDT and Agent Orange. Her father is a vet, so there may be commentary on her town being a destructive force on several levels (i.e. not only to their family and town but to the whole world). The DDT seems symbolic of the crippling or stifling way she interprets her town (Leechfield).
I love her humor. I laughed out loud when she made the remark about their favorite games involving people passing out or vomiting.
I also like how she really gets into the mind of herself as a child. When she describes herself sitting on the toilet and grabbing at the stockings in her sisters hand, it struck me how childlike that is. She really understands the simplicity, the immediateness of being a kid.
Great book! I can’t wait to talk about the rest of it.

Where is all the Lesbian Lit??

It has come to my attention that all of the books I grew up with, the ones that formed my opinions of what it means to be gay, were written before 1980. “Where did all the lesbian lit go?” I ask.
I have a theory. I think the ’90’s were graced with some of the best economic times on record, as well as a growing sense that the government was some all powerful entity that regular people weren’t meant to interfere with. People picked up their credit cards and put down their pickets, heading to the mall to eradicate any feelings of inadequacy.
I came out in 1998, going to my first gay bar in 2001. Walking through those rainbow doors for the first time, I was amazed by the lack of concern. Where I thought there would be activists and earth and politically conscious citizens sitting around talking about the latest advancement in gay marriage rights, I found handfuls of pills washed down with vodka or beer. When I asked people about their political ideologies, they usually laughed and told me to lighten up.

Then the 2000 election came along, setting our fears in stone. Those fears that my generation harbored, were manifested with glaring atrocity. Ballots were “lost” and “misread” or just plain thrown out and suddenly there in front of us sat helplessness, futility and the deepest rooted…fear.

What does all this have to do with lesbian lit? Simple. It didn’t get published because the publishERS didn’t think anyone would read it and they were probably right, to some extent.
After researching for some time, I’ve compiled a list of lesbian fiction and non fiction that were published around or after 1990. Some of them, I had actually read, but only since I came to college; I don’t recall hearing of them before that.
Here are some of the titles:
Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
Affinity by Sarah Waters
Selects Her Own by Claire Garden
Window Garden by Janet McClellan
Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schuman
The Bebo Brinker Chronicles (series) by Erika Lopez
The Comedienne by Val G. Lee
Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
Three Junes by Julia Glass
The Last Resort by Alison Lurie

And then….
I found a website that actually discusses this lack of lesbian lit and explains that there is a new resurgence of youth lesbian lit as of recently. It’s a page off of the afterellen.com page.

Is lesbianism more attractive now that it’s been exploited by heterosexual men? Or are publishers just recognizing that lesbians read too? Either way, I’m glad the strike is over.

The Blogosphere

I have some experience with Blogging. Admittedly I have a few online journals other than this one. There is my cartoon which I have been posting for over a year, and I also have a blogger journal which I don’t update much, but use for storage of writings that I want to edit. In my experience with the “blogosphere” as they call it, it seems that the ones that draw my attention are the ones with pictures, the ones that are personable (easy to identify with) and those that are on topics that interest me (obvious, I know).
As far as blogs that offer true writing, I find they are harder to come by. It seems that blogging has offered something very dynamic to the literature, in that it is easier for the writer to get their work out there, but it seems that there is still difficulty from the other end: the reader getting to the work.

Most of the writing centered pages are more like workshops or news-letters. I can think of a few that I visit on a regular basis, like Fresh Yarn and Salon which are very much for and about writers and can leave “amateurs” feeling left out or intimidated. I read them, they inspire me to write, but I am too timid to participate, and honestly don’t even know if I am allowed. (Don’t you have to have a degree or something? )Anyhow, I do recommend typing in “writing salon” into Google to get a perspective of the amount of stuff available. I would like to think that as people become more comfortable and savvy with the online world, there will be a simplification of the organization of information on the web.There is just too much!
In closing, I would like to share one of my comics with you. I hope you like it.