It’s been so long since I’ve written here one of my own comments got thrown into the moderation queue. This isn’t a comeback, it’s an attempt at breaking the monotony of writing lesson plan after lesson plan. After this, I’m back to the real world through the end of the week. At least.
Anyhow, I wanted to share these links before they are so old as to be irrelevant.
• Susie Bright shares an unpublished interview with Andrea Dworkin in which she discusses her place in modern feminism (pdf).
Extra cool is that the interview was conducted by Will Self, an author whose novel “How The Dead Live” is currently on my nightstand. He also wrote a book called “Cock & Bull” in which a woman begins developing a penis and a man wakes up with a wound on the back of his knee that turns out to be a vagina. I haven’t read it yet, but the two vignettes are supposed to be quite interesting (but not exactly feminist in nature). It, too, is on the bookshelf waiting to be read. The main character in “How the Dead Live” is a wickedly witty woman who dies of breast cancer and we follow her story from the beginning of her adult life into her afterlife.
I will say this: Mr. Self can write a compelling woman.
• Dr. Myers gives “the proper reverence due those who have gone before” us in a compelling piece about history and memento:
…a bone isn’t just beautiful operational engineering, it’s a trace of a person. It’s a melancholy memento of all that’s been lost…here is this human being who struggled and loved and dreamed and hurt for sixty years, and all that I had of her was a few exquisitely patterned swirls of hydroxyapatite. So much was gone, so much lost, and that’s the fate of all of us — all it takes is a few generations for all personal memory to fade away, and all that’s left is abstractions. For most of us, there won’t even be bits of dry bone in a box in a forgotten room, we’ll be ash and slime, our existence unremembered.
• Cheryl Rofer of Whirled View looks at “The Fall of the Russian Empire,” a “mediocre” novel from the early eighties that manages to get some of the facts right. Rofer uses the novel as a jumping off point for a review of the nuances of the falls of Russian and East European political empires.
• The Language Log informs us that absolutely is totally not definitely. Good to know.
By the way, Language Log is like porn to linguaphiles.
• The Alan Guttmacher Institute reports that the gap between U.S. women’s birth control needs and governmental response to those needs is widening. No surprise there.
The budget President Bush presented to Congress in early February would drastically cut Medicaid as a whole, and the Administration is hoping to change the program’s rules to allow states to reduce benefits for some enrollees–possibly including eliminating the guarantee that family planning services are provided at no cost. Yet The Alan Guttmacher Institute estimates that every $1 spent on contraceptive services saves $3 for pregnancy-related and newborn care alone, and a government analysis shows that states that got federal approval to expand Medicaid coverage for family planning saved money while serving more women.
“Ironically, Medicaid is on the chopping block even as evidence mounts that it can be used to both improve access to contraception and reduce health care costs,” Gold continued. “As we grapple with the future of Medicaid, we should consider how to encourage states to expand their investment in family planning because it makes for sound fiscal and public health policy.“
• From The Well-Timed Period: This article from a medical news source asks, “When do medical professionals have the right to opt out of treating patients?”
Dr. Dunlop does not believe a patient’s right to access to care trumps his right to practice according to his moral beliefs. “Is their inconvenience of driving to the next town more important than my conscience?” he asked. “I would say not.”
If a patient asked him to do something he morally objected to, Dr. Dunlop said he would “facilitate transfer of care,” which he said does not necessarily constitute a “referral.”
The real question seems to be, as Ema says, “Who is more important?” And the answer seems to be, “Not the patient.”
• Culture Kitchen is on a roll this month. Liza Lorraine, guestblogger extraordinaire, has written some great stuff, in particular Male Fantasies, in which Liza draws a connection between fascism and a “masculinity crisis,” and Andrea Dworkin and Me, a post that honors the complexity of Dworkin’s work, and the complex relationship that many feminists have with her words.
The post on Dworkin made me remember a simple quote by Catharine MacKinnon that I could easily turn into a 2000+ word post: Man fucks woman. Subject verb object. It also reminded me how most feminists espouse a far different version of sexuality that queers these traditional models worthy of criticism and how feminism (and feminist porn) for the most part seeks to convert sexual relationships into more tactile, meaningful models, or subject-oriented and away from the object-obsessed. Moving along before I get carried away on the nuances of phallologocentricity and phallocentric sexualities…
• The Super’s Blog, a blog written by a superintendent in Indiana, looks at the school vouchers controversy in a completely non-satirical way (as is her/his usual mode) and makes predictions that are quite uncomfortable. In part:
1. Vouchers will be approved within 5 years throughout most states in America.
2. Within 15 years, most voucher supporters will be disappointed in what vouchers have brought to the private schools…
3. Within 15 years, “balkanization” of America will begin occurring and lawsuits charging discrimination and segregation will once again be working their way through the legal system. Most of these lawsuits will occur in the suburbs of urban markets where a larger number of private schools exist.
4. Salaries for private school educators will have risen due to the market/demand for more teachers. This growing demand for private school teachers will further erode the private school mission…
5. Salaries for public school educators will grow stagnant as public school districts struggle to keep pace with rising health insurance, rising property and casualty insurance, rising utility costs and lack of funding support due to charter schools, tax vouchers and tax credits.
6. Teacher shortages will develop as college students begin to choose professions that haven’t been denigrated so badly.
Do read the whole thing.
• Dave Neiwert of Ornicus looks at what seems to be compelling evidence that hate groups, or at least race-based hate crimes, are on the rise among young people.
• At Crooked Timber, a guest blogger names Kimberly has done a series of posts on families and economics, all of which were quite compelling. This one asks whether children are public goods: “…parents bear most of the costs of raising children, to the extent that children grow into productive, tax-paying citizens, they create positive externalities that benefit the rest of society. People who contribute little time or money to the raising of children essentially free-ride on the parental labor of others.”
• This marketing campaign by Penguin publishing attempts to make boys into more active readers. I can’t argue with that.
• Joel, though totally serious, made me laugh out loud with this post.
I think the Bushes are an excellent example of the principle I am about to invoke and the harm it does: most parents are unable to recognize the mediocrity of their children… When I hear Barbara Bush defend all her sons as “good boys” I hear the very reason why we should renew heavy inheritance taxes: we can’t afford to allow the less-merited to decide the course of our lives.
• Brandon of One Child Left Behind has a heart-breaking account of having grown up abused. I don’t feel right pulling a quote, so read the piece in its entirety.
• At The American Street, Flamingo Jones asks whether men are proud of this guy:
MALE PRIDE by Dallas Claymore
Christ was a man, Moses was a man, and Mohammed was a man. The conclusion that I draw from this is Thou shalt never apologize for being a man…
How many times have you been in some overpriced trendy chic restaurant and looked at the menu and groaned, “Why me?” Yet, it always is you and it’s always you who gets stuck with the bill, but it is rarely you who finds any value in 25 dollar entrees. Many of these premium dinners are inferior to the stuff you buy at the stadium or cook on the grill, yet it is you who still has to take the beating. On top of having extortionary prices, those places make you leave hungry which is reason enough to stick to pizza. However, regardless of how insane the whole cash squandering thing is, we are forced do it because women expect it.
I sincerely hope the answer is a hearty hell no.
• Shari knows what’s really wrong with the public school system. Here’s a hint: it ain’t the teachers or the level of accountability.
• Frequent Feministe commenter Heliologue writes on Christ figures in the works of Chuck Palaniuk.
Chuck Palahniuk, most famous for penning the novel upon which 1999’s Fight Club was based, incorporates messianic qualities into most of his main characters. For the uninitiated, Palahniuk’s writing is defined by morbid sequences of events, surrealism, and a preoccupation with ponderous, DeLillo-esque social commentary, not the least of which is that people harbour bizarre and damning fetishes, secrets, and virtually no control over self and destiny. What better summarises Christian self-deprecation?
• New addition to the bloglines account, Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, a blog that falls squarely into the party of common sense.
To close, I’m rewriting my Baby Mama post in order to sumbit it to BUST. A sincere thanks to Rachel for the heads up (we’re real hard up on cash these days).
And you know what’s sad? This is only half of the posts I have bookmarked to highlight. The better to procrastinate with, my dear.
See you next week.