Flickr, oh Flickr…?
Odd things have been happening to a particular photo of mine from this post here: http://yseult.mediaevaliter.com/2011/08/01/happy-world-breastfeeding-week/
It would suddenly disappear from my Flickr photo feed, then reappear again. It wouldn’t load into my post, but when you’d click on it, you could still see it on Flickr’s page.
Currently my latest Flickr feed plugin shows that the picture is ‘unavailable’ when in the feed it is still viewable.
If this is one of the big clean ups on Flickr as several breastfeeding support groups have seen on Facebook (Petition, and news coverage 2009 and from January 2011), then I am not amused.
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On literary cannibalism
A pretty aggressive article by Laura Miller on Salon.com on her problems on NaNoWriMo. While I won’t go into the ironic ridicule with which Miller is covering herself ranting against writing when she herself has already been published, as if to say ‘Ah… you know, it’s actually not that interesting’. But we’re not looking at the Mona Lisa here, rather the opposite.
First off: I like her point. I don’t like her writing, much too verbose for what she’s saying, or rather repeating over and over that reading is more important than writing, because – after all – writing will out on its own.
But see, the lady has a point. Or half of a point. Because without reading how can anybody aspire to actually write anything decent? Miller is right in emphasising:
I say “commerce” because far more money can be made out of people who want to write novels than out of people who want to read them. And an astonishing number of individuals who want to do the former will confess to never doing the latter. “People would come up to me at parties,” author Ann Bauer recently told me, “and say, ‘I’ve been thinking of writing a book. Tell me what you think of this …’ And I’d (eventually) divert the conversation by asking what they read … Now, the ‘What do you read?’ question is inevitably answered, ‘Oh, I don’t have time to read. I’m just concentrating on my writing.’”
That, I personally find shocking. While I’ve been struggling to keep up my reading pattern of at least one book a month ever since getting pregnant and juggling a full time job, I would never one minute put my writing in front of my reading. Both are symbiotic and I realised that the first time I thought ‘wow… you’d think this is Lord Byron’s soggy writing’ when reading something old of my own feather. We are fundamentally influenced by what we read and even more so immediately after we’ve read something. This influence is proportional to the length of the book or the length of the author phase that we are going through. I am sure others have witnessed this slow tendency to start writing in large, expressive sweeps after reading a Brontë novel.
While I don’t savour Ms. Miller’s venom as much as other commenters have, I do salute her drive and her message: we need to encourage people to read more.
Ask yourself, would you like to read an epic three part novel by an author that hasn’t read Shakespeare and is almost illiterate in terms of world literature and writing?
I wouldn’t.
There used to be this rite of passage that in order to write, you had to read the classics to understand the finer workings of good plot, of good character depiction etc. and namely to what my mother (and Rilke) used to call ‘form your mind’. This, of course, is an ongoing process and at the end, the things we write at the end of our lives are fundamentally different from what we write as teens. But that’s the point. Without progression, a novel can neither be good nor bad. It would just be a very boring play. Called Waiting for Godot.
Godot never came.
Hence no progression.
Makes for a bad novel. But a great play.
Without knowing these subtleties, without referencing them, we lose this fundamental and important element of human culture that makes progress even possible: mental and literary cannibalism. Without it, everything will become just an occurrence. A singular event in the minds of currently living persons. As opposed to a literary act that is realised within a set of events lined together through time and that through quotation and citation becomes a strand that makes up the fabric of human creation.
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The post-feminism fallacy
After months of intense preparation to finish big projects that mean a lot to other people and thus by extension mean a lot to me (… another topic, for another time…), the time is finally here.
That moment when I finally start realising that in all truth: you cannot have it all.
I’ve been raised in a post-fervent feminism age, where women’s rights are a comfortable blanket you wrap yourself in and where the reality of the disadvantage of being a woman is always somewhere hidden behind the surface. True female discrimination, the open kind, is something that is barely visible today. (Not unlike the Covert racism my friend and writer Nicki Lisa Cole has written about).
The real problem is twofold: you’ll always be put down by people. Does it really matter what’s the reason? Sex, gender, nation, skin color? The biggest stepping stone for this problem to grow is us getting used to it. As human beings one of our most important evolutionary achievement is the capacity to forget. Forget and move on.
Based on this, is the second part of the ‘twofold’. We women have grown up to feminists and womens right’s acitivists telling us that we can have it all. Have your career, because your grandmother and mother couldn’t have one. Make your decisions for yourself. And once you’re ready, you can have your relationship with the best man in the world, get pregnant and share all your mental and intellectual wealth with your child. Have it all and lose nothing.
It’s been said more than once, and yet, everytime a woman says it people look away as if they’re witnessing a train wreck. (Or a dirty secret, which might not be all that far off from the truth.)
While I specifically will not negate a woman’s God given capacity to handle 100 things at one moment, that undeniable possibility for their brain attention to completely split off into a multitasking frenzy (I am a pro at that), I will argue that something always gets lost. Falls into the cracks of attention and is forgotten.
The same goes of career and family.
And now comes the caveat our mothers only knew too well. Because family in my case is composed of two people. Because a relationship asks for compromise and building something together. And while I am no one to doubt that some women can achieve their dream of a career and a full family life, I would however doubt that they’ve achieved this simultaneously and that they have achieved this with a partner engaged in their own career.
No, today we have this bipolar approach of you can have it all, as long as no man asks you to do it all together. Then women are all up for it and woe to them if in the small hours of the morning they confess to themselves that indeed, they can’t.
Come to think of it, why should we? Why does it seem that for the new generation of women, feminism has in fact raised the pressure to be perfect and have it all, instead of valorising our choices for what they are: a celebration of our liberty to choose.
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Same procedure as every year
Yes, it’s that time of the year again: A Note to Spouses.
Thank you, Philosophers Anonymous. Thank you. I love you a little more, every year. *wipes tears away*
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Focus. Everything else is unimportant.
I’ve had a couple of rough weeks with projects that simply refuse to become accept the yellow ‘stable’ tag. Other projects that like orphans wait patiently for any kind of attention.
And while the world economy and England mirror this state of concerned array until the folders in the lower drawers start plotting a riot, I am realising that the one thing I am missing is harder to come by than peace…
Focus.
It’s really something that only we can establish. Like peace bringers in a destabilised country or nation, we are the only ones that can organise and prioretise.
But, all said and done, what is focus? The simplest thing of all. Finding what’s important and then take it and run with it.
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