I do not question the right of the writer to engage in debate on public matters, to make common cause and practice solidarity with like-minded others.
Nor is my point that such activity takes the writer far from the reclusive, eccentric inner place where literature is made. So do almost all the other activities that make up having a life.
But it’s one thing to volunteer, stirred by the imperatives of conscience or of interest, to engage in public debate and public action. It’s another to produce opinions—moralistic sound-bites—on demand.
Susan Sontag, “The Conscience of Words” (via michelledean)
Firestone was buried, in a traditional Orthodox funeral, in a Long Island cemetery, where her maternal grandparents are interred. Ten male relatives made up a minyan. None of her feminist comrades were invited. “At the end of the day, the old-time religion asserted itself,” Tirzah said. Ezra gave a eulogy. He lives in Brooklyn, where he works as an insurance salesman, but he hadn’t spoken to Shulamith in years, and he broke down several times as he told how she, more than anyone else in the family, had tended to him as a child and taught him compassion. He recalled a story she told him when he was a boy, about a man on a train who realized that he had dropped a glove on the platform and, as the train left the station, dropped the other glove from the window, so that someone could have a pair. Then he lamented Shulamith’s “tragic” failure to make a “good marriage” and have children “who would be devoted to her.”
When Tirzah’s turn came to give a eulogy, she addressed Ezra. “I said to him, ‘Excuse me, but with all due respect, Shulie was a model for Jewish women and girls everywhere, for women and girls everywhere. She had children—she influenced thousands of women to have new thoughts, to lead new lives. I am who I am, and a lot of women are who they are, because of Shulie.’ ” ♦
Susan Faludi: How Shulamith Firestone Shaped Feminism : The New Yorker
—A terrifying image of the force feminism is up against to change women’s lives.
Anselm Berrigan has just about finished tweeting in reverse chronological order most of the material from a long poem made of a spatially regulated succession of single floaty lines called Primitive State, which Edge Books will republish some time down…
