My flight home from Florida just got changed from Sunday night to Monday morning. (So much for having “status” on American Airlines.) I know that some of my students read my blog, so if you’re enrolled in my Monday day classes, those classes are, I regret, cancelled. My Monday night class will meet as scheduled; I’m due into LAX now at 1:40PM and that ought to give me more than enough time to reach Pasadena by 6:00PM. I can’t promise a shower in between.
I’ll try to get back into regular blogging next week. For now, a smattering of links:
Chris Clarke’s new book, Walking with Zeke, is available. For fans of animals, good writing, or both, this is a must-have.
There’s a great discussion at Feministe about the perils and rewards of blogging about your personal life.
Daisy at Our Descent on the problem of “being a good man.”
Richard Mouw makes his usual good-sense on “seeker-sensitive” churches.
Brownfemipower on renouncing the feminist label.
Anxious Black Woman on keeping the feminist label.
A rape survivor looks for fellow survivors to help with a survey.
Lauren admits she loved Zamfir and his pipes when she was a child, and asks for readers’ embarrassing revelations about the poor aesthetic choices they made when they were small.
In a piece that may have more than a little bearing on the “attribution/appropriation” wars in the blogosphere lately, songwriter Darrell Brown tells of being an “emotional spy”:
We (songwriters) record everything we witness in some way or another, taking notes on scraps of paper or recording snippets of melody or other inspiration into our voice mail so when we are alone we can retrieve and use them later. Another friend, Mary McCann, a poet who lives in Seattle, summed this process up pretty well: “Keep livng and take really good notes.”
Yeah, that’s true for bloggin’ as well.
Hugo, if I thought I could deal with my “white” privilege by writing a song about it, or that I could make an analogy between the personal observation that goes into art and the intensely political process of packaging, defining, and presenting ideas in their pipeline from marginal origins to lucrative mainstream, then I’d agree with the substance of your analogy. If I understood how you could conflate the conflict that has given rise to the pain and rage expressed in the post you link to by “Brownfemipower” with the self-awareness and personal observation of a good writer, then may your analogy would not sound incredibly insensitive to me. And if I had not read the pain that sounded through the pages of several associated web logs, I might hold back from the temptation to say that the time has come for impartial judgement and fairness, and that a point comes where defending your friends ceases to qualify as personal loyalty and changes into bias, excuse making, and upholding privilege.
But I don’t, so I won’t.
Re: the “attribution/appropriation” wars:
http://dearwhitefeminists.wordpress.com/
John Spragge is right. It’s way past time for those of us with privilege (especially those of us with big blogs) to recognize the reasons that women of color like BFP are done with us, and to change our behavior. We should not be fighting women of color. We should not be divided. What does it make us when the blogosphere is split between WoC and white feminists?
Oppressors.
If something makes you happy and hurts/upsets no one else, it is not a “poor esthetic choice”, however unusual it might be. Nor a “guilty pleasure”, for no one need feel guilty about emotional responses they can’t help. I liked some stuff when young that I don’t now, but the changes over the decades have mostly been the other way–adding new ones.