“responsibility, free”
The Courage of Someone Else’s Convictions
Elizabeth on Ellen Willis (and writing about Ellen Willis).
When people write about Ellen Willis, they tend to write in the first person. A friend pointed this out last week, after listening to me complain about trying to write about No More Nice Girls. It was so good, I told her, I felt like anything I wrote wouldn’t be on its level, wouldn’t capture the complexity of the arguments Willis—radical feminist, visionary cultural critic, revolutionary intellectual and intellectual revolutionary—makes so lucidly and hilariously and persuasively. How to say anything about someone who said everything, and so well? And so I was having a hard time—harder than the usual time, which is always hard, and inevitably reminds me that I’m stuck in here for good, sentenced to a life inside myself, with nobody coming to release or replace me. Maybe this was why people keep resorting to memoir: there was only one Ellen Willis, the rest of us are ourselves, and so the best we can do is report, from the inside, what it feels like to encounter Ellen Willis.
But even that seemed sort of futile, like when we try to explain to strangers—or even our friends—what makes the people we love lovable: she’s so funny — he has the best smile — she makes such good arguments about abortion and pleasure and marriage and liberty and America at the end of the 20th century. No matter how thorough the list, it always feels incomplete, providing all the measurements but never a sense of what is being measured.
Last weekend Kathleen, Elizabeth and I threw together this pamphlet for the NYC Slutwalk. “Bitch, Sister, Bitch!” (think of it as an encouraging injunction, not a series of competing forms of address) is a part remedial history part instruction manual: a guide to feminist consciousness-raising. You can expect more of this from the Research Collective.
ADDENDUM: Erin was also caught on camera distributing/representing at occupy wall street:
I can also offer an outtake from last weekend. The following declaration from Vivian Gornick was in contention for the bottom right pull quote, and though we didn’t have the space, it’s worth including in this context:
“That is a moment of joy, when a sufficiently large number of people are galvanized by a social explanation of how their lives have taken shape, and are gathered together in the same place at the same time, speaking the same language, making the same analysis, meeting again and again in New York restaurants, lecture halls, and apartments for the pleasure of elaborating the insight and repeating the analysis. It is the joy of revolutionary politics, and it was ours.” - Vivian Gornick
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Patrick Wolf - The City
A gem from looking up lyrics on the internet: (sax solo)
GRE Test Prep
With many thanks to proofing the FCI’s Level 5 and 6 recipes, I will have no problem with the word viscous. Or the noun form viscosity, if that comes up.
